CINCINNATI – The 1919 World Series is known historically for the Black Sox Scandal, the exile of eight Chicago White Sox players from baseball for conspiring with gamblers to fix the series they were heavily favored to win.
In Cincinnati, it’s also known for the Reds’ first world championship. And an eclectic new display of 1919 Series artifacts offers the first extensive Reds’-eye view of the scandal.
The exhibit shows that the Reds were a very good team – best record in baseball that year – and could have beaten the Sox, whether they were trying to lose or not. (Hey, this is Cincinnati’s history, not Chicago’s.)
“We wanted to have a sense of pride in that 1919 team, tell sort of the lost side of the story. It’s always been told from the point of view of the White Sox,” explained Greg Rhodes, executive director of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum.
The exhibit, which includes the ball hit by the legendary Shoeless Joe Jackson for the final out and silent-film footage of the series, has been a hit since opening in May.
Impressed by the interest shown, Rhodes is looking ahead to developing a tour of Cincinnati sites connected to the scandal that spawned myriad books and Hollywood movies such as “Eight Men Out” and “Field of Dreams.”
The Reds, who opened their museum in September 2004, are one of only a handful of major league teams with facilities dedicated to their history and best players. But several teams, including St. Louis, Atlanta and Baltimore, have recently expanded museums or have plans to, and the Kansas City Royals plan to build a museum at their stadium.
The Cleveland Indians resumed team Hall of Fame inductions this summer after a 34-year hiatus and plan to add a Hall of Fame exhibit next year just beyond the center-field wall at Jacobs Field.
Paula Homan, curator of the St. Louis Cardinals’ museum, said baseball fans often feel very personal connections to their teams, and want to share that with children and grandchildren.
“There’s the ability to relive memories, for grandfathers to stand in front of the Stan Musial display and hand down stories of their memories of Stan Musial,” she said. “There are fans who want to come into the museum and pore over every single case.”
All of that is fine with the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., which has loaned out exhibits and artifacts to support individual teams’ efforts to showcase baseball history in other parts of the country.
“Cooperstown isn’t accessible to everybody,” said Hall of Fame spokesman Jeff Idleson.
Cooperstown gets 300,000 to 350,000 visitors a year; the team sites each draw about 20 percent to 25 percent of that.
Cincinnati seems a natural spot for a baseball museum. It was here that the first professional baseball team was born with the 1869 Red Stockings.
The team’s history is loaded with other milestones such as the first night game (1935), the only pitcher (Johnny Vander Meer in 1938) to pitch back-to-back no-hitters, the youngest player in modern history (15-year-old Joe Nuxhall in 1944), and the breaking of baseball’s all-time hit record by Cincinnati native Pete Rose (1985).
Opening Day each year is virtually a local holiday, with a downtown parade featuring politicians and celebrities preceding the game.
Rhodes said there had been talk of a Reds Hall of Fame Museum for decades. One longtime fan, Dan Cron, formed a nonprofit corporation with the thought of one day creating a museum with memorabilia he began accumulating as a boy in Celina, Ohio, and added to at auctions and with the trove of a retired Reds usher.
The team, however, discontinued electing team Hall of Fame members for nearly a decade, until Reds executive John Allen revived the practice in 1998. The club then included a museum in planning for its new Great American Ball Park, which opened in 2003.
Rhodes, who brought experience from the Cincinnati Historical Society and Museum Center, said the goal for the $10 million project was a family-geared attraction combining memorabilia with interactive exhibits and themed areas in its 16,000 square feet of exhibit space.
Visitors can pitch off a regulation-sized mound to a plate 60 feet, 6 inches away, leap against an outfield wall to simulate a home run-stealing catch, broadcast their own play-by-play of Reds highlights, or pick up a phone to hear former Reds leaders discuss trades and strategy.
Among themed exhibits are “Glory Days,” where fans of a team who last won the World Series in 1990 can relive winners such as the dominating “Big Red Machine” championships of 1975-76, and “Baseball Heaven,” a fantasy rec room with bobbleheads, baseball cards, scorecards and a TV running Reds highlights and bloopers.
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