Pools
In 1915, Baseball Magazine published an article called, “The Crime of Baseball Pools.” In the opening paragraph, writer F.C. Lane—no stranger to an editorial flourish or two—wrote, “Professional baseball pools have created an unprecedented situation. An amount of money estimated at the colossal total of $1,000,000 a month has gone into the coffers of lying, swindling gambling pools who take even the pennies from school children for their crooked lottery tickets. It is high time that organized baseball and the United States government officials took cognizance of this wide spread evil, and with the public cooperation, sweep it into oblivion.”
Baseball pools in the early 20th century were as common among sports fans as NCAA basketball bracket pools, fantasy football leagues or pick ’em pools are today. It wasn’t high-stakes stuff, but there was, at the time, the feeling that all gambling was rooted in evil and should be eliminated. According to a June 1918 article in the Tribune, there were as many as 500 pools being run around the city. 
Gamblers participating in the 1916 World Series pool would get a card with players listed on it, like this one. (Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.) “It is an epidemic,” the paper wrote.
There were different kinds of pools at the time, and different stakes. Some big pools paid more than $1,000 to the winner. Whatever the stakes, the pools were fairly similar in their operations. The player would pay some small amount—a dime, a quarter, 50 cents—to enter the pool, and would then be given a combination of teams over either a day or a week. Whichever player held the combination of teams produced the most runs would win. It was low-risk, high-reward gambling, and it thrived in the form of large, interstate pools, like Pittsburgh’s Keystone Pool; Chicago’s Home Run; Great Western, based in Wisconsin; Consolidated of Indianapolis; and others across the country.
There were periodic attempts to bust and prosecute pool operators and players. Just before the 1916 World Series, police raided an office in the U.S. Annuity Building on Jackson Street in Chicago’s Loop district and arrested John Kilcoyne (doing business as J.F. Mack), for printing World Series gambling cards and distributing them across state lines. Kilcoyne was familiar with pool-related arrest. He had been nabbed for pool-selling in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., in July 1915, as part of his involvement with the Weekly World and Pastime Review pools. That arrest was just one of many made in connection with pool-selling in 1915. At the time of Kilcoyne’s 1915 arrest, the New York Times reported that federal authorities, “were determined to stop the operation of baseball pools in all parts of the country.” They didn’t succeed.
A copy of Kilcoyne’s 1916 World Series card, given to this website by Peter Alter of the Chicago History Museum, shows that there was a “subscription fee” of 50 cents for the card. Gamblers were to pick players participating in that year’s World Series, and those who collected the most hits or runs would win the pool. The card shows that first place in the hits pool and the runs pool was $1,000, and that there were prizes down to eighth place ($100). There were also prizes for the first through sixth worst performers.
Not all pools were so widely orchestrated, though. “There are said to be 500 baseball pools, or as many throughout the city as there are enterprising proprietors of saloons, barber shops, offices and cigar stores,” the Tribune reported. The paper further described the operation of the smaller, daily pools, in which players picked just two teams. “A nice little book of coupons, holding 120 chances, is handed out to the gambler by the saloon, barber shop or cigar store proprietor. He pays a dime and draws a sticker. When the sticker is opened he finds the names of two baseball teams. … If, on the day he bought his ticket, these two teams, together, total the largest number of runs gotten by any two teams that day, he wins $8.”
Much of the money brought in by pools went into the pockets of those who ran them. In 1920, the Tribune wrote, “Small fry gamblers proverbially do not figure the percentage against them. They do not stop to realize that for every dollar paid in, only 50 cents come back to them, even if the pool is conducted honestly.”
Crusades against underground sports gambling, of course, were not just frequent in the early 20th century—gambling scandals are a part of American sports history throughout, and have affected not only boxing, horse racing and baseball, but college football and basketball, the NFL and, most recently, the NBA, which dealt with a gambling scandal involving a referee in 2007. But, certainly, attitudes toward small, pool-style betting have changed in the time since Lane declared pools a, “wide spread evil.”
