I was just listening to the V Show on ESPN Radio and he was talking about a baseball fixing scandal from the early days involving Napolean LaJoie and Ty Cobb....I did some research and came up with this:</p> </p> "Their rivalry reached a peak in 1910, when the Chalmers Auto Company promised a car to the batting leader (and MVP) that year. Cobb took the final 2 games of the 1910 season off, confident that his average was high enough to win the AL title—unless Lajoie had a near-perfect final day. Lajoie, a far more popular player than Cobb, was allowed by the opponent St. Louis Browns to go 7-for-8 in a season-ending doubleheader. After a ‘sun-hindered’ fly went for a triple and another batted ball landed for a cleanly hit single, Lajoie had five subsequent 'hits'—bunt singles dropped in front of the (manager-ordered) deep-fielding third baseman. With one more hit, Lajoie would pass Cobb and win the title outright. On his 8th at-bat that day, Lajoie’s bunt safety was ruled an error. The subsequent chicanery involved the Browns’ manager and a coach offering to change the decision of the official scorer, who was a woman, to whom they offered to buy a new wardrobe. Considering the uproar that followed, the Browns fired their manager and coach. Nap Lajoie on a 1911 American Tobacco Company baseball card.As it turns out, Lajoie's average is not the only one tainted by controversy - Cobb's average might have been inflated by counting a single game twice in his statistics, as researchers discovered 70 years later. In the end, the Chalmers Auto Company avoided taking sides in the dispute by awarding cars to both Cobb and Lajoie." </p> </p> People truely hated Ty Cobb with a passion....Ive read that Nap Lajoie was very well liked though....I guess this is good evidence of that</p>
