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EDWARD VICTOR CICOTTE
Born June 19, 1884
Death May 5, 1969
Son of Ambrose and Archangeline (Drouillard) Cicotte
Married Rose Ellen Freer 19 May 1905 Atlanta GA
Children: Rose Ann 27 Nov 1906
Virginia June 27 Jun 1916
Edward Victor 1 Nov 1919
Major League Baseball Player
One of the 9 members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox
who were banned from Baseball for life for throwing the
1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.
Photos found on Find-A-Grave
Baseball photo by Ron Moody
Headstone photo by "TB"
Major League Baseball Player with the Chicago White Sox. Cicotte was a crafty right-hander and might have been remembered as one of the greatest pitchers of the game. With pinpoint control and a repertoire of deceptive pitches, he led the American league with 28 wins and a 1.53 ERA in 1917. Only Walter Johnson was better. He knew all the tricks, dusted batters, threw a black ball, shine and emery ball. He was friendly on the field, but seldom mingled with the rest off the field.
In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald suggests that Meyer Wolfshiem is involved in baseball's infamous 1919 World Series scandal. The series took place between Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox, who were heavily favored. The White Sox, however, lost five games to three, and eight players were accused of accepting money to "throw" the games. The players included Edward Cicotte, Claude Williams, Arnold Gandil, Oscar Felsch, Charles Risberg, George Weaver, Fred Martin, and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. All of the players were eventually cleared of criminal charges by a grand jury, but they were soon banned from all levels of professional baseball, and their statistics removed from the record books.
Eddie was very smart and very successful in everything he did. He was a dedicated family man and basically very shy. He never gave press interviews and anything you see written about him in newspapers or magazines is mostly a fabrication of a reporter's imagination. I spoke to Eliot Asinof, the author of Eight Men Out at an event sponsored by NPR with Bill Littlefield a few years ago. I asked him how he got the information he used about Eddie. He confirmed that Eddie never gave interviews and refused to speak to anyone about the scandal. Eliot had high praise for Eddie though and thought he was a decent man who got caught up in events he couldn't control. He remarked about how the player's wives and family were threatened by the gamblers if they refused to cooperate. Eddie had a son Ed Jr. who was born in November, 1919 just after the series was over. He would have been extremely vulnerable to such threats.
Eddie always told family members that he was never involved and that he didn't believe that the game was thrown. They just had a bad series. According to family lore the entire event was a fabrication of aggressive reporters looking for a story and gamblers who lost their shirts when the Sox didn't win.
Eddie was 35 years old when he was "banned" from baseball. He would very likely have retired from baseball soon in any case. He went to work for Ford within a year afterward and retired as Chief of Security in 1944. He bought a farm off of Merriman Rd near 7 mile road in Livonia, MI and raised strawberries. He was known to grow the best strawberries in the region and did very well.
Biography from "Paul" on Rootsweb World Connect
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