CHICAGO, Oct. 9.—The Cincinnati Reds are the champions of the world. They beat the White Sox at Comiskey Park this afternoon, 10 to 5, in the eighth game of the series, and took the series five games to three. The game was decided in the first inning, when the Reds made four runs off Williams before he had put out more than one man. Eller, who shut the Sox out on Monday, pitched the whole game and won his second victory of the series.

After Sunday’s rain Eller’s shutout on Monday put the Reds four games to one, and a championship banquet was ready in Cincinnati on Tuesday. They needed one more victory, and it took them three days to get it. Kerr won in ten innings at Redland Field on Tuesday, Cicotte won on Wednesday before a crowd less than half the size, and the series came back to Chicago. Moran sent Eller back on Thursday, and it was over in the first inning.

No National League club had won the championship since the Boston Braves in 1914, and the Reds have beaten the club most of the experts picked to win.

THE FIFTH GAME: CINCINNATI, 5; CHICAGO, 0

Monday at Chicago was clear and cool, with the outfield soggy and the infield dry and fast. The crowd was smaller in the bleachers at noon than on the Friday or Saturday, and grandstand tickets could be bought at par in the morning, but by game time 34,379 had paid their way in.

Hod Eller gave them very little to cheer. He allowed three hits and one pass, and he struck out nine men, six of them in a row: Gandil, Risberg and Schalk in the second inning, and Williams, Leibold and Eddie Collins in the third. The New York Sun calls the six in succession a new world’s series record. Only two Chicago men got as far as third base. The Sox had their best chance in the first, when Leibold walked and Weaver’s single bounced off Eller’s glove, putting men on first and third with one out, and Moran sent Luque out to warm up. Jackson popped to Groh and Felsch flied to Duncan, and Moran was heard to tell Daubert that the boy had found himself.

Williams matched him for five innings. The sixth was the White Sox’s undoing. Eller drove the ball to deep center with two strikes on him, and when the throw-in got away from Risberg he went on to third. The accounts differ on how: the New York Tribune says the relay was deflected; the Sun says Felsch’s throw was high and Risberg muffed it. Moran ran out and put a sweater on his pitcher. Rath singled him home, Daubert sacrificed, and Groh walked. Then Roush lifted a fly to center that Felsch got his hands on and dropped, and Rath and Groh scored. The scorers gave Roush a triple, which the Sun says only the most liberal scoring could allow. McGeehan, in the Tribune, wrote that Roush was officially the hero of the inning but that there was no hero in it, only a goat, and his name was Felsch.

When Groh was called safe at the plate, Schalk swung at Umpire Rigler, who ducked. Schalk then threw his mask toward Jimmy Ring, who had come over from the Cincinnati bench to talk, and Rigler put him out of the game. The Sun says no player had been put out of a world’s series game since Frank Chance in 1910. Lynn caught for the rest of the afternoon. Duncan’s fly to Jackson brought in Roush with the fourth run, and in the ninth Eddie Collins fumbled a grounder, his first error in a world’s series since 1913 by the Sun’s count, and the Reds got another.

Before the game Herrmann’s little German band paraded the field playing “O Tannenbaum,” and Comiskey’s band answered with a march. Afterward Moran told the reporters: “It’s all over but the shouting. We’ll win again to-morrow, no matter who Gleason pitches.” Of his pitcher he said: “Eller pitched one of the greatest games that ever won a world’s series to-day. He couldn’t be touched, that’s all.” Lieb and McGeehan both write that Eller was once White Sox property, let go rather than paid for. Grantland Rice wrote that the Cincinnati pitchers had held the Sox to one earned run in forty-five innings.

THE SIXTH GAME: CHICAGO, 5; CINCINNATI, 4 (TEN INNINGS)

At Redland Field on Tuesday the Reds led by four runs and lost in the tenth. It was an ideal Indian summer day. The Sun’s correspondent wrote that “not even the vaguest suspicion of a cloud showed in the deep blue dome that covered the arena,” and that most of the crowd “sat in their shirtsleeves.” A third of the grandstand, by his count, were women, with the usual sprinkling of red hats among them. Before the game a delegation of Texas oil men gave Dickey Kerr a gold watch.

The Reds scored twice in the third, when Daubert singled and stole second, Kerr hit Roush with a pitch, and Duncan doubled to right center. In the fourth Neale tripled, Ruether doubled him home, and when Rath grounded to Risberg, the shortstop’s throw toward third hit Ruether on the shoulder and Ruether scored. That made it 4 to 0.

The Sox came back. In the fifth Ruether walked Risberg and Schalk and Kerr beat out a hit, filling the bases with none out. They got only one run of it, on Eddie Collins’s fly, and Kerr was caught between first and second and tagged out by Groh, who walked over from third to do it. McGeehan said it looked like bush ball. In the sixth Weaver’s short fly fell between Kopf and Duncan for two bases, Jackson singled him home, and Felsch doubled Jackson home. Moran took Ruether out for Ring, and Schalk’s single tied the score. The Sun reports that Weaver, coming in on Jackson’s single, never touched the plate, and that Rariden did not notice and no play was made on him.

Ring and Kerr held on until the tenth. Then Weaver doubled to left, and Jackson bunted and was safe when Rariden fumbled. Felsch struck out. Gandil chopped a single over Kopf’s head, and Weaver came in with the winning run.

Thousands who could not get into the park stood around the newspaper bulletin boards downtown and cheered every Cincinnati hit. When the Sox were flashed as the winners, the Sun reports, there were groans, and then a general rush to cancel railroad reservations. Moran said afterward: “To-day’s game was a heartbreaker for the Reds to lose. We should have won it half a dozen times. But the strain of the world’s series is beginning to tell on my players and they were a bit unnerved.” Rice wrote that no club in any past world’s series had changed its form so suddenly as the Sox did, and gave the credit to Weaver, Schalk, Kerr and Gandil. McGeehan found the game as loose as ashes, but said it was the only one so far with anything like a thrill in it.

THE SEVENTH GAME: CHICAGO, 4; CINCINNATI, 1

Cicotte asked for the ball on Wednesday morning, and Gleason gave it to him. The veteran had told his manager that if the Sox got him a couple of runs early, the Reds could not break him down. They got him one in the first, when John Collins singled, Eddie Collins sacrificed and Jackson singled; one in the third, on Jackson’s single past third; and two in the fifth, when Groh and Rath fumbled grounders in turn and Felsch singled to center. Moran walked out to the box and took Sallee out for Fisher. The Reds got their only run in the sixth, on Groh’s double and Duncan’s single. Cicotte allowed seven hits, and the game took an hour and forty-seven minutes.

Gleason had moved Felsch to right field, where the sun would not trouble him, and put John Collins in center. With two men on in the fifth Moran sent up Ruether, the hero of the first game, to bat for Fisher, and told him that if he had a triple left in his bat, now was the time for it. Ruether fouled out to Weaver.

Only 13,923 paid their way in, the smallest crowd at a world’s series game since 1909. The morning had been cold, 48 degrees, and people got out their overcoats, though it was fine by noon. The Sun puts most of the blame on Herrmann, who announced that no seats would be sold until one o’clock, an hour before the game, and asks how anybody could imagine that 32,000 seats could be sold in an hour. Herrmann himself came out ten minutes before the game, looked over the stands and put the crowd at barely fifteen thousand. McGeehan blamed Cincinnati: “The thing happened in a park that was half empty. The bugs have wearied of the series and the local nuts seem to have abandoned the team and everything connected with it.”

Moran said Cicotte was the master that day and that he would pitch Eller the next day. Gleason said his men had gone into the game with the old dash that won the pennant, that they were right now, and that they would beat Eller. Damon Runyon writes that Cicotte’s baseball obituary is now recalled from circulation, and that the Sox have shown they have what baseball calls, uncouthly, the guts. Runyon also reports that Moran had an umpire look over Gandil’s glove during the game.

The National Commission announced that Cincinnati had won the toss, and that a ninth game, if one was needed, would be played at Redland Field on Friday.

THE EIGHTH GAME: CINCINNATI, 10; CHICAGO, 5

It was over in the first inning. Thursday morning in Chicago began wet, under heavy black clouds, but the sky cleared as the morning wore on, and the sun was strong enough to bother the outfielders all afternoon. Rath popped out. Daubert and Groh singled, Roush doubled past first base, and Duncan doubled over Weaver’s head into the left-field corner. Three runs were in, and Gleason took Williams out and sent in James. James walked Kopf and struck out Neale, but Rariden’s Texas-leaguer over first scored Duncan, and it was 4 to 0. Lieb writes that there was nothing fluky about the hits; they were all solid pokes. Gleason said afterward: “If Williams had shown some ’stuff’ in the first inning it would have been a different story to tell to-night. But he didn’t have a thing except a desire to beat the Reds.”

The Reds added one in the second, an inning in which Groh was spiked by Gandil and lay on the ground for some minutes, and one in the fifth, when Kopf tripled and scored as Weaver and Risberg got tangled on Neale’s grounder. Jackson hit a home run into the right-field bleachers in the third, the only home run of the series. In the fourth Leibold threw Eller out at the plate on Daubert’s single, which McGeehan called as fine a piece of fielding as the series had seen. In the sixth James and then Wilkinson gave up three more runs on Eller’s single, a pass, a wild throw by Schalk and singles by Roush and Duncan, and in the eighth Rariden singled Roush home to make it 10 to 1. Hundreds of the crowd had gone home by the sixth inning.

The Sox gave those who stayed something to shout about in the eighth. Eddie Collins singled and Weaver doubled down the right-field line. Jackson doubled both of them home, and Gandil’s fly, which Neale lost in the sun, went for a triple. Risberg’s fly, which Roush dropped, brought Gandil in. Four runs were in, Moran went out to the box more than once, and Ring warmed up. Eller stayed in. In the ninth Roush ran down Leibold’s long drive, and Jackson, with two out, grounded to Rath, who threw to Daubert, and the world’s series of 1919 was over. Bulger, in the Evening World, says the Chicago crowd gave Eller a great ovation, and the Chicago Tribune says it cheered the former Sox cast-off every time he came to bat. The Chicago paper also reports that the Sox, evidently thinking Eller was mutilating the ball to make it hop, asked Umpire Nallin to examine it again and again.

Moran said: “The Reds are champions and I am the happiest man in the world to-night. I cannot praise my players too highly.” He added that the Sox were no quitters but a game lot of players who had fought to win and been outclassed, and he admitted they had given the Reds a scare. Gleason said the Reds had been lucky to win the early games, but that they had beaten the Sox in one of the greatest series ever played: “my hat is off to them. But I still believe the Sox is the better ball club.”

HOW CINCINNATI TOOK IT

The news of the last game reached Cincinnati through the bulletin boards, where thousands had gathered. The Associated Press reports that joy ran at flood tide that night, and that impromptu processions marched through all sections of the city.

The team came home on Friday morning. The acting mayor, Carl Jacobs, proclaimed a public holiday from eight o’clock until noon, many business houses stayed closed, and the schools let out. The Reds’ train reached the Central Union station a little after seven, and it seemed, by one Cincinnati dispatch, that half the city was there to meet it. “Hats were thrown into the air,” it reports, “and men, with their arms around one another’s necks, performed weird and extemporaneous dances. Women, many of them wearing hats of vivid crimson, climbed on the iron railing between the train shed and the depot proper and screamed at the top of their voices.” Moran had to salute constantly in answer to the cheers. Church bells, fire bells and the whistles of the factories, the steamboats and the locomotives joined in.

The players fought their way to automobiles and rode to the Business Men’s Club for breakfast, through the downtown streets, with the windows and sidewalks full along the way and fans on foot following the cars. The Cincinnati Times-Star, as reprinted in Kentucky, says the banners were flung out and were still flying. A rally and sing had been called for Fountain Square at ten o’clock. It rained, the rally was put off, and the players went out to Redland Field instead, held their last meeting of the season and waited for their checks. The cry most often heard at breakfast asked who had taken the glee out of Gleason.

HOW CHICAGO TOOK IT

Chicago’s rooters stayed with their club to the end. At Orchestra Hall, where the Chicago Tribune ran an electric scoreboard for the family of a railroad flagman crippled in a wreck, 1,168 fans paid fifty cents each on Thursday to watch the last game, and inning after inning, the paper says, they begged the little figures on the board for a rally. A huge crowd stood in Grant Park watching its free board on Michigan Avenue. The Chicago Tribune says the Sox fans rooted to the last out and gives Moran and his men full credit: in most of the games, it says, the Reds played the better baseball. It adds that the result has left breaches in the club’s harmony, with such resentment toward some of the players who did not come up to expectations that changes in the team before next season are likely. Mr. and Mrs. Comiskey plan a trip to Excelsior Springs to recover from the excitement.

After Monday’s shutout the Sun’s correspondent wrote that the city was brooding in an atmosphere of helplessness, and McGeehan that it had ceased to worry over the series. McGeehan pictures Comiskey ducking for the nearest exit after Thursday’s first inning. I. E. Sanborn, in the Chicago Tribune, wrote that Cincinnati’s fans had come into their own after half a century of waiting, and that the Reds had burned up the White Sox on the anniversary of the day Mrs. O’Leary’s cow burned up most of Chicago, forty-eight years before. Gleason congratulated Moran and still holds that his is the better club. Comiskey says that although the extra games helped his club this time, he is as much opposed to a nine-game series as ever, and he believes the public would rather have a short one.

THE RUMORS

Comiskey Offers $20,000 for Evidence of Fraud

President Comiskey of the White Sox said at Chicago on Friday night that he would give $20,000 for a single clew leading to evidence that any of his players had deliberately tried to throw a game of the series to Cincinnati. He said he was sure of their fidelity. Some of the players, the dispatch adds, had taken to heart rumors, given considerable circulation, that a few of their number might have played for money. “These yarns are manufactured out of whole cloth and grow out of bitterness due to losing wagers,” Mr. Comiskey said. “I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent world series on the level, as they have always done.” The New York Tribune printed his offer on its front page on Saturday, and his denial again on Sunday; the New York Times carried it too. The Chicago Tribune, which tucked it into a story on ticket sales, gives the figure as $10,000.

The rumors were heard in both cities, and the Sun gave them a headline across its sports page on Saturday. In Cincinnati, after the Reds lost on Tuesday, many fans argued that the club had lost on purpose to lengthen the series for the owners’ benefit, and Wednesday’s thin crowd was taken as a sign that the town believed it. The Sun’s correspondent there called it “the customary uncalled for and ridiculous charge of hippodroming.” It was said there too that Duncan and Kopf had let a fly fall in Tuesday’s game for a consideration, and that Ruether had not been in condition to pitch it. In Chicago it was said that Cicotte had been paid to lose his games, and that five members of the club had been given $100,000 by gamblers.

In Chicago the talk had begun earlier. After Kerr’s victory on Tuesday, I. E. Sanborn wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the Sox’s work “silenced all the dangerous gossip that had been circulated by disgruntled gamblers.” After the last game the same paper reported that stories were out that the Sox had not put forth their best effort, and that the big gamblers had got to them; its man, James Crusinberry, wrote that they “all sounded like alibi stuff even if true.” Gleason offered no excuse but the Reds’ better baseball. “I don’t know yet what was the matter,” he said. “Something was wrong. I didn’t like the betting odds. I wish no one had ever bet a dollar on the team.” On Sunday Sanborn wrote that baseball men fear what the betting cliques are doing to the game.

Daniel, writing from Chicago for the Sun, set the stories down. He reports talk there that there will never be another world’s series and calls it buncombe, born of the ugly rumors that went around both cities during the series. The stories hurt baseball, he says, but they will do away only with the nine-game series, and he holds that both clubs played up to their true form. Hugh Fullerton, in a column printed on Friday in the Hearst papers and others, thinks Thursday’s game was in all probability the last world’s series game ever to be played, if the owners value the good name of the sport, and that it meant the breaking up of the White Sox, with seven men who will not be with the club next spring; but he puts the defeat down to overconfidence and tells his readers to forget “the suspicious and evil minded yarns.” Lieb, in the same paper, regrets that the cries of “fake” and “frameup” heard from one end of Cincinnati to the other after Tuesday’s defeat “left quite a stain on the city’s honor.” On one point Lieb goes further: he writes on Sunday that the reports about Ruether’s condition in the sixth game are unfortunately true, and that he kicked over the traces while the series was on. McGeehan, in the Sunday New York Tribune, writes that “there was a lot of bad baseball perpetrated during the struggle for the world championship, but nothing worse.” He thinks the high prices and the big money drew the petty gamblers, and he asks for a reorganized National Commission headed by a man of judgment and standing, before stories like these are believed.

WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY

The experts, who mostly picked Chicago, now mostly give the series to the Cincinnati pitchers. Lieb, in the Sun: “Cincinnati’s victory was clean cut and well earned. The Reds played better baseball than the White Sox and had by far the better pitching.” He adds that when Chicago’s two best pitchers failed, Gleason had nothing but pitchers of American Association grade to send in to relieve them, while Moran’s staff is the best in the land. Bozeman Bulger, in the Evening World: “Above all, this series has convinced experts of the game that a world’s championship is merely a question of pitchers.” Bulger names Eller the real hero of the series, but finds that most of the games smacked of the town lot.

Not everyone was pleased with the play. Runyon called the last game “a sort of burlesque touch to a show that for a couple of days gave signs of becoming quite a drama,” and McGeehan called it the most loosely played game of a loose series. McGeehan also blames the magnates, who stretched the series to nine games for the money; he says the Reds would have been champions days sooner without it, and that which is the better club will be argued all winter. The Sun reports that the spectators “would rather have had the series over in the regulation limit of other years.”

Lieb, writing again on Sunday, finds the victory not only deserved but good for the game. The National League had won only one of the nine series before this one and was being spoken of as just a step above the American Association, and evenly matched leagues make for lively competition.