The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [56]
Johnson wanted to handle matters privately, without the press or even Commissioner Landis finding out about things. Some reports claim that Johnson and the league owners tried to buy the letters from Leonard in exchange for his silence. Apparently Johnson and Landis had been feuding for years, ever since Landis came in and demanded total authority over baseball in his attempt to clean up the game.
Ban Johnson needed to conspire with Tigers owner Frank Navin as well as with Cobb and Speaker to get them all out of this mess started by Leonard’s accusations. Johnson met with Cobb and Speaker separately and privately (Wood was long gone from the majors by this point). In October of 1926, Navin announced that Cobb would not be retained as the Tigers’ manager for 1927. “Georgia Peach Declares He is Through With Baseball, Moriarity Named New Pilot,” was the banner headline in most newspapers across the country. The stories put out by the Associated Press reported that Cobb had tried to buy into the Tigers, to no avail, and that he might take over managing the Atlanta team in the Southern League. The story also pointed to dissention in the Tigers clubhouse.
Three weeks later, it was announced that Speaker would not be retained as the Indians manager, either. That item, also unexpected, raised considerable eyebrows. The plot to have both Cobb and Speaker retire as players and be fired as managers was hatched by A.L. President Johnson. Landis apparently went crazy when he found out that Johnson had permitted the two stars to quietly resign. He didn’t get wind of any evidence of scandal until months later.
Johnson said, “When I found that two of our managers were not serving us properly, I had to let them go. Now isn’t that proper? As long as I am president of the league, neither one of them will manage or play on our teams.”
The story soon broke, and real reason Cobb and Speaker stepped down came out. Landis asked Leonard to come to his office to face Speaker and Cobb and make his accusation directly. Leonard refused to go to Chicago, where there were people, he reasoned, who were adept at knocking off guys like him for a price. Baseball didn’t have a lawyer like John Dowd, but there was an investigation.
By late December, the story had unfolded in the press, and it was clear which side had won in the media and court of public opinion. Billy Evans, the former umpire and one of the leading sportswriters of his time, wrote that Leonard had been branded the “Squealer.” Evans said, “Even in our kid days, the ‘tattle-tale’ was never a very popular person.” Evans wrote that Leonard’s charges “were purely a matter of personal revenge.” The column could have been written by Cobb, or one of Cobb’s attorneys. Evans wrote as if Leonard had squealed on him personally. “To use the slang of baseball, Leonard never was regarded as a real game guy. . . . Leonard was a southpaw with good speed and a fastbreaking curve, a truly great pitcher had he possessed the proper heart and temperament.... He liked to pick his spots. He would pitch often against teams against which he was effective, but either had a sick stomach or a sore arm when named to work against a club that liked his stuff.” One bold sub-headline read, “Leonard’s Temperament Not Unlike Chorus Girl.” As in the case of many conspiracies, it is often imperative to knock the whistle-blower. “It is a crime that men of the stature of Ty and Tris should be blackened by a man of this caliber with charges that every baseballer knows to be utterly false,” Evans wrote.
When re-reading the microfilm from Evans’ 1928 column, I learned something that I hadn’t known about the case. Apparently, if Leonard had accumulated ten years of Major League service time, he would have been able to get his unconditional release on the ground that he was a ten-year man in the majors, which would have enabled him to sign a fat contract with a