I’ve loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the 1919 World Series,” said Hyman Roth, in The Godfather, Part II. Roth was the cinematic version of Meyer Lansky, the mob’s longtime financial genius. From The Great Gatsby to Field of Dreams, to the book Eight Men Out and the film it spawned, the “Black Sox Scandal” that roiled and ultimately reformed major league baseball remains an important part of history and popular culture.

In 1919, the NFL and NBA didn’t exist, and the NHL consisted of four Canadian teams playing their second seasons. Baseball was the major sport—the national pastime, as it still is known—and the nation paid close attention to the regular season and the sole post-season event, the World Series. In 1919, that series would pit the Cincinnati Reds against the Chicago White Sox.

Most experts expected the White Sox to win the series, despite having a worse record than the Reds during the regular season. It was the Reds’ first World Series appearance, but the second in three years for the White Sox. The National League winner had one true star player, Edd Roush, a future Hall of Famer, but a strong lineup and a great pitching staff. The White Sox, owned by league co-founder Charles Comiskey, fielded numerous stars, including second baseman Eddie Collins, a future Hall of Famer, and outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson, a great hitter who could have been a Hall of Famer.

In 1919, the owners and the National Commission—the two league presidents and a team owner who oversaw the majors and arbitrated disputes, with fewer powers than the major league commissioner has today—had expanded the series to nine games from seven in hopes of making more money. Whether the players’ shares of that money would grow much was another matter. At the time, major leaguers were paid far less than they are today, even allowing for inflation. Many of them had to work during the off-season.

The series began on October 1. The first game was played in Cincinnati. From the outset, the White Sox made errors and played sloppily. The Reds won the first two games of the series, then the White Sox came back to win the third game, at home. They lost the next three and were one game from elimination before winning two more. They then lost the eighth game and the series.

Rumors quickly spread that the White Sox had been paid off to throw the series to the Reds. The next year, a Chicago grand jury investigated, and star pitcher Eddie Cicotte confessed in late September that he and other players had taken money from gamblers who wanted them to lose. With three games left in the season, Comiskey suspended Cicotte and six other players who were implicated in the scandal and still members of the White Sox (the eighth player involved was no longer with them). The White Sox had been fighting for the pennant; instead, they finished second to the Cleveland Indians.

The grand jury indicted eight players—Cicotte, Jackson, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver, pitcher Lefty Williams, center fielder Happy Felsch, utility infielder Fred McMullin, and the only one of the group no longer in the majors, first baseman Chick Gandil—on several charges, including conspiracy to defraud. After their trial in 1921, a jury took three hours to find them not guilty, then went to a party with the players.

But a key reform meant the eight players were finished with baseball. The owners, fearing gambling and fixes would ruin the sport, asked a federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis to become a member of the National Commission. Landis refused unless he could be the commissioner alone and have absolute power. The owners gave him what he wanted. Landis became baseball’s first Commissioner, and he suspended the eight players for life.

That decision caused controversy. When Weaver objected that he hadn’t participated in throwing the Series or received any money, Landis reminded him that he knew about the payoff and didn’t report it. Jackson, who was illiterate, hit .375 during the series, and some baseball experts still argue that he should be elected to the Hall of Fame, despite Landis’s ban.

Although Landis acted quickly and forcefully, the Black Sox Scandal could have seriously damaged baseball. Other players had been involved in throwing games, but none of these scandals had touched baseball’s premier event. But an important change was on the horizon that helped to save the game. In 1920, when the grand jury indicted the White Sox, the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees and he became a superstar, revolutionizing the game with his home runs. As Tommy Henrich, a future Yankee, later said of baseball, “Landis cleaned it up and Ruth glorified it.”

Lost in the whole scandal was the role of the Reds. Gamblers had approached one of their players too, who told him to get lost. They stayed clean and won a tarnished victory, though Edd Roush later told Lawrence Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times, “One thing that’s overlooked in the whole mess is that we could have beat them no matter what the circumstances! Sure, the 1919 White Sox were good. But the 1919 Cincinnati Reds were better. I’ll believe that till my dying day.”