Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 195, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1915 — HIT BASEBALL POOLS [ARTICLE]

HIT BASEBALL POOLS

Success or failure in the efforts now being made to suppress the baseball pools is of vital importance to the professional end of the national pastime. Amateur baseball we shall always have, writes I. E. Sanborn in the Chicago Tribune. Success will mean the elimination of one of the many ills which are sapping the life out Of the game. Failure will mean eventually the elimination of professional baseball from the field of sport to the same extent as running races have been, and for much the same reasons. From small beginnings, confined to purely local fields, the baseball pool has grown to national proportions. Unchecked this cancer will attain still greater growth until its tentacles penetrate every nook and corner where baseball is spoken. At the outset when the sums involved in the pools were comparatively small, there was little danger to the game. Whenever big money begins to enter into the proposition there always is danger. The average American citizen, being perfectly certain that he himself would do almost anything if the price was big enough, naturally believes the promoters and others engaged in bhseball would do the same for a price. And it is only necessary to have the gambling side of a sport mount high enough in dollars to bring suspicion on the honesty of that sport.