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As America lurched into the twentieth century, its national pastime
was afflicted with the same moral malaise that was enveloping the
rest of the nation. Players regularly bet on games, games were
routinely fixed, and league politics were as dirty as the base
paths. Against this backdrop, Hal Chase emerged as one of the
game's greatest players and also as one of its most scandalous
characters. With charisma and bravado that earned him the nickname
The Prince, Chase charmed his way across America, spinning lies in
the afternoon, dealing high-stakes poker at night, and gambling
with beautiful women until dawn. Most notoriously of all, he
undermined his stature as the era's greatest first baseman by
conniving with gamblers to fix games and draw teammates into his
diamond conspiracies. But as Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella
reveal in their groundbreaking biography, The Black Prince of
Baseball, Chase was also a scapegoat for baseball notables with
hands even dirtier than his. These included league officials who
ignored facts in an attempt to pin the 1919 Black Sox scandal on
him and-a previously unknown twist-the fabled John McGraw, who
perjured himself on a witness stand against the first baseman.
Although Chase, contrary to popular belief, was never banned from
the major leagues, meticulous research by the authors implicates
him in other shady enterprises as well, not least an attempt to
blackmail revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson. As The Black Prince of
Baseball makes clear, in his protean talents and larcenies, Hal
Chase personified all the excesses of Ragtime.
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