Louisville Grays Scandal

The Louisville Grays Scandal was a game-fixing scandal that took place in 1877. Four players on the team, Bill Craver, Jim Devlin, George Hall, and Al Nichols were banned from playing baseball in the National League as a result of their involvement with it. Supposedly, Devlin had come clean first, thinking that his teammates already had confessed, which then led Hall to confess too. All members of the team were ordered to hand over their telegrams to the Grays' president, Charles E. Chase, and Nichols' involvement with the scandal was discovered through doing so. Craver was the only player who refused to hand over his telegrams, and so he was banned out of pure speculation (he already had a bad reputation for fixing games throughout the 1860s and 1870s and had been thrown off teams in the past for doing so).