We all know that historically speaking, baseball is an exceptionally spooky game. Not only in the sense of measuring all players’ success against the ghosts of those that played before them, but also in the case of delivering the inadvertent prophecy. (An eerie example is the story of Ray Chapman, which I wrote about here.)
This one is equally bizarre.
In a display of coincidental yet unmitigated clairvoyance, writer Hugh Fullerton “saw” a crucial element of the ill-fated 1919 World Series puzzle unfold four years before it happened.
As one of America’s leading sportswriters in 1915, Fullerton often wrote fictional stories in addition to his regular beat reports in the newspaper(s.) That year, he published a novel about a left-handed pitcher named “Williams” who was bribed by gamblers to lose the pennant. Four years later, in an unbelievable parallel, left-handed star pitcher Claude “Lefty” Willaims would do just that – as he and the other members of the infamous “Black Sox” would conspire with gamblers to fix the 1919 World Series.
Fullerton, who for many years had written about the dangerous gambling element in baseball, covered the Series and was the reporter who first broke news of the scandal after it ended and the Cincinnati Reds had won.
Was Fullerton psychic? Perhaps not. But some things are just too strange to be purely coincidental…
Radbourn's Revenant 