Eliot Asinof

“To Replogle, the players were victims. The owners poured out a stream of pious, pompous verbiage about how pure they were. The gamblers said nothing, kept themselves hidden, protected themselves —and when they said anything, it was strictly for cash, with immunity, no less. But the ballplayers didn’t even know enough to call a lawyer. They only knew how to play baseball.”
― Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series

“To Cicotte, who had known Burns over the years, his performance was baffling. He had never sensed that the drawling Texan was capable of anything like this. Burns could make a dozen mistakes, find himself in a manure pile of troubles, yet now he came up clean. Cicotte need slip only once, and they'd be cutting him up in pieces.

On the mound, Cicotte was king. Year after year, they hadn't come any better. Burns had been a sloppy, very mediocre, third-rate nothing. Was the difference all in the skill of the pitching arm? What changed the pattern when it came to really staying alive?

The answer to that was the answer to the whole story of Cicotte's life. He had grown up believing it was talent that made a man big. If you were good enough, and dedicated yourself, you could get to the top. Wasn't that enough of a reward? But when he got there, he had found otherwise. They all fed off him, the men who ran the show and pulled the strings that kept it working. They used him and used him and when they had used him up, they would dump him. In the few years he had been up, they had always praised him and made him feel like a hero to the people of America. But all the time they paid him peanuts. The newspapermen who came to watch him pitch and wrote stories about him made more money than he did. Meanwhile, Comiskey made a half million dollars a year on Cicotte's right arm.

Burns knew how to operate. So did Gandil. Cicotte didn't. That was the answer.”
― Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series