Baseball's Dark Prince: Hal Chase the New York Yankees First Superstar and the Game's Most Degenerate Gambler
The first superstar of the New York Yankees--then called the New York Highlanders until around 1913-- Hal Chase, was never formally banned from professional baseball despite his reputation as the game’s biggest gambler, game fixer, womanizer and immoral drunkard at a time when the sport was filled with gamblers, game-fixers, womanizers and immoral drunkards. The man that many in the press somewhat derisively called “Prince” Hal, after Falstaff’s young drinking buddy in Shakespeare’s series of King Henry plays was never convicted, at least not on paper in a court of law anyway, of any wrongdoing. But Hal Chase’s decorated playing career, in the Major Leagues and his infamous notoriety as a gambler among sportswriters and fans, ended not with a conviction but with an anticlimactic unwritten agreement by everyone in professional baseball to mark and avoid the talented first baseman in 1919 after he had spent fifteen seasons as one of the game’s finest players on the baseball...