OK, free association time. I say "crooked ballplayers," and you say ... "Chicago Black Sox, 1919," because eight of the White Sox conspired to throw the World Series that year. Or maybe you say, "Pete Rose," because he acknowledged that he bet on games as a manager, unless it was one of the days when he didn’t acknowledge that.

But your free association probably wasn’t "Hal Chase." Maybe it should have been. And maybe, after you hear his story, it will be.

Hal Chase broke into Major League Baseball as a first baseman with the New York Highlanders, destined to become the Yankees. This was in 1905. By then, fixed ballgames had been common for some time.

"Baseball and crooked baseball grew up together, good twin and evil twin," baseball historian Charles Fountain says. "The first game-fixing scandal was three months after the end of the Civil War."

Fountain says there were even rumors of a fix at the first World Series, in 1903.

"There were rumors of games being fixed whenever games were played, literally," he says.

Into that baseball era came Hal Chase. He was handsome and personable. The New York writers soon dubbed him "Prince Hal." He was also, by all accounts, a bright and observant fellow. He could see the signs outside some ballparks that read, "Place your bets." And he was a terrific player.

"The people who saw him play said that he was the best defensive first baseman that they had ever seen," Fountain says. "These are people that saw all of the Hall of Famers: George Sisler and Bill Terry and Lou Gehrig. And everyone felt that he would have been a lock for Cooperstown, had he been a player who concentrated on baseball."

Rumors And Whispers

Alas, Chase didn’t do that. Maybe it was in part because he was contemptuous of his less talented peers, which, as far as Chase was concerned, meant all of them. One anecdote about an especially good play by Chase so illustrates:

"A writer came up and said, 'Good job on that,'" Fountain explains. "And he said, 'I could make plays like that every day, but I’m afraid of cutting loose, because I’m afraid of hitting one of those dopes in the head.'"

The first indications that Hal Chase was supplementing his income as a ballplayer by partnering with gamblers came in 1907. Some of his teammates became suspicious. The front office didn’t want to hear about those suspicions.

"This was one of the great stars, and no one wanted to know the truth," Fountain says. "It was much better for the game if it remained whispers. Rumors weren’t good, but proving those rumors to be true would have been lethal."

So Chase kicked the odd ground ball away or lost a crucial pop fly in a sun shining only on him. And sometimes he got more creative.

"He would, in the locker room, go to Player A and say, 'Do you know what Player B said about you?'" Fountain says. "And he would then go to Player B and say, 'Do you know what Player A said about you?' And, in so doing, would create dissension and cliques in the locker room. And if players are distrustful of one another, it’s an easy task to go up to one of them who’s frustrated and say, 'Hey, you wanna get back at all those guys? What do you say we let the other team win again today? And here’s 500 bucks for your efforts.'"