First Baseball Scandal?

[runningshoes]

In September 1865 gambler Kane McLoughlin paid William Wansley, Tom Devyr, and Ed Duffy of the New York Mutuals 100 dollars to throw a game they were playing with the Brooklyn Eckfords the following day.

By all accounts it looked like a normal game until the fifth inning, when the Mutuals allowed 11 runs through “over-pitched balls, wild throws, passed balls, and failures to stop them in the field….”

Was this baseball’s first scandal or were there others we can point to that had an impact on the game?

Please discuss

I’ve included an account of the game.

http://www.ajclay.com/PTC/pictures/792.jpg

[Brian McKenna]

It's actually 1865.

This is definitely not the first game-fixing scandal but it is perhaps the first significant one. For some others follow Tammany Hall activities.

The impact on the game is debatable since it wasn't until Judge Landis that the b.s. essentially stopped.

[runningshoes]

That was just a typo.

I couldn't find anything on Kane McLoughlin in the papers and really no account of the scandal until years later.