The Life & Death of Jim Devlin, Baseball’s Original Cheat

You can’t cheat an honest man … except maybe in sports. In the summer of 1876, a Brooklyn bookie by the name of Fred Seibert tried with his partner, a man named McCloud, to enlist Jim Devlin in throwing a game or two. Devlin flatly rejected Seibert’s overture. The next year, though, on a road trip to New York City, he was introduced to McCloud by the newsstand operator at the hotel in which he was staying. Devlin changed his mind and with that, the Grays lost to Cincinnati … and then Indianapolis. And so on in the summer of ’77.