How the Chicago White Sox Ruined Sports Betting

America’s distrust of sports betting can be traced to the night of 21 September 1919. That’s when several members of baseball’s Chicago White Sox met with gambling boss Arnold Rothstein in a New York hotel room to throw the following month’s World Series. The scandal that unraveled after the White Sox’s sluggish five-games-to-three loss to the Cincinnati Reds hurled into the fire the innocence of a nation and led to the appointment of baseball’s first commissioner: Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It also created a firm distaste for any implication that sports were somehow compromised. History forgets the eight players involved were…