CHICAGO _ Debra Ebert and Sandy Schley sat toward the back of the second-floor ballroom at the Chicago History Museum, amid the crowd of 200 baseball fans and history buffs as historians, writers and professors delved deeply into the records and ramifications of the infamous 1919 World Series.
Fans and members of the Society for American Baseball Research spent their weekend listening to debates about the legacy of Sox star "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and club owner Charles Comiskey, gobbling up every morsel of information about the Black Sox betting scandal.
Ebert and Schley's connection to the topic cut deeper than most at the society's Black Sox Scandal Centennial Symposium. Their great-uncle, Sox third baseman Buck Weaver, was one of the eight players permanently banned from baseball in the aftermath of the Series.
"Sometimes," Schley said, "it just feels sad. It feels sad, but you just keep trying. You feel it in your heart."
One hundred years after the Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in the Series _ a result quickly shrouded by allegations that several members of American League champion Sox had "thrown" the Series, intentionally playing poorly because they had been promised money from gamblers if they lost _ Ebert and Schley remain committed to clearing the name of their relative.
Weaver himself repeatedly appealed to the baseball commissioner for reinstatement, writing letters every year, his family said, for the rest of his post-baseball life. After his death in Chicago in 1956 (he is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago), his family took up the mantle. With the help of advocate David C. Fletcher, a baseball fan from downstate Illinois who is founder of the Chicago Baseball Museum, the family staged a protest at the 2003 All-Star Game at Sox Park and again penned letters to the commissioner asking that baseball consider clearing Weaver's name.
"We've done what we've done, but MLB was not interested in acting and they refused to meet with his family," Fletcher said. "He never had due process."
While many of the specifics of the scandal are murky and steeped in debunked myths popularized by books and movies like "Eight Men Out" and "Field of Dreams," it is generally believed that Weaver attended at least one meeting about fixing the Series but never took money from gamblers or intentionally played poorly in the field that autumn.
To his family, the punishment has never fit the crime.
"The things that people get away with now, this is like nothing," Ebert said. "If someone would just listen to us ..."
With the Sox set to play the New York Yankees next August in Dyersville, Iowa, at the farm that was used to film the famous ballfield-in-the-cornfield scenes in "Field of Dreams," the Weaver descendants sense a new opportunity on the horizon.
"We may have to dust off the 2003 plan," Fletcher said.
