Livonia – When the city recently unveiled plans for a new downtown city center, Mayor Maureen Brosnan led off her comments with a restylized quote from “Field of Dreams.”
“If you build it, they will come.”
Many Livonia residents are unaware of the special connection between Livonia and the movie about the spirits of eight players on the Chicago White Sox’s infamous 1919 World Series team who were banned from professional baseball forever for allegedly taking bribes from notorious mobster, Arnold Rothstein.
Eddie Cicotte was one of the infamous White Sox, subsequently nicknamed the Black Sox, and a Livonian—one of the very first.
He was born in Springwells Township—now Dearborn—on June 19, 1884. As a young player, Cicotte was traveling around Michigan playing semipro baseball as far north as the Upper Peninsula.
A skilled knuckleballer, Cicotte was scouted by, and given a tryout for, the Detroit Tigers.
Making his debut in 1905, but bouncing up and down between “The Show” and the Minor Leagues for two years, the Tigers sold Cicotte to Boston in 1907. During his five seasons with the Red Sox, Cicotte was a serviceable pitcher with a 52-46 win-loss record, posting a fairly decent 2.69 ERA.
Red Sox owner John Taylor felt Cicotte was more talented than his record indicated and suggested he was underachieving, scapegoating him to the media. After four starts in the 1912 season with a 1-3 record and a 5.67 ERA, Taylor’s frustration with Cicotte came to a head.
Cicotte, age 28, was sent packing to the Chicago White Sox and quickly found his niche.
Immediately showing improvement, he developed his knuckleball into an unhittable pitch and expanded his repertoire to include a blazing fastball, a shine ball, an emery ball, and a curve ball.
Labeled a trickster with a crafty ability to “doctor” a ball, Cicotte flirted with controversy for using various methods to effect spin on his pitches, including hiding talcum powder and other substances on his body during games.
Within a couple seasons, Cicotte was considered one of the best pitchers in baseball—if not the best. An absolutely dominant ballplayer, he began racking up remarkable win-loss totals and was the ace starting pitcher for the 1917 World Series-winning Chicago White Sox.
At some point during Cicotte’s baseball career, he purchased—and subsequently remortgaged—a farm with several acres of property, located at 31540 Seven Mile Road near the intersection of Merriman Road, in an unincorporated region of western Metro Detroit, then called Gilt Edge.
Cicotte continued his baseball career through the 1920 campaign, until the Philadelphia North American set the world on fire by exposing a bribery scheme involving the eight Chicago White Sox players who threw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.
According to all available reporting at the time—and biographies written after the fact indicating Cicotte was a morally upright and clean-living ballplayer—Cicotte was ethically tortured by his involvement.
He immediately testified in front of a grand jury, naming his coconspirators and throwing himself at the mercy of the baseball commissioner.
Although Cicotte and teammates were acquitted of criminal wrongdoing, based on evidence indicating they were actually playing to win even after they took the money, all eight players were given lifetimes bans from Major League Baseball.
Like the most famous Black Sox player Shoeless Joe Jackson, Cicotte continued playing in minor league and “outlaw” baseball for several years under false names—referred to by baseball historians as a “mercenary pitcher.”
By 1924—at age 39—Cicotte had fully retired from baseball and was working at Ford Motor Company while operating his strawberry farm in Gilt Edge.
In 1938, the Detroit Tigers invited Cicotte to take part in opening day ceremonies in defiance of his lifetime ban, and interestingly, there is no record of the MLB penalizing the Tigers or acknowledging the event.
In middle and into old age, Cicotte became locally famous again for his strawberry farm—drawing customers from across the Metro Detroit area. Retiring from Ford, he continued his farming through the years.
In 1950, the township of Gilt Edge was part of the incorporation of several townships into the city of Livonia, and Cicotte has the distinction of being one of the first Livonia residents.
According to Joe Falls, a sports writer for the Detroit Free Press, Cicotte was a staunch supporter of the Detroit Tigers until the day he died on May 5, 1969.
Falls eulogized him by noting that Cicotte was one of the very few pitchers who had bested Babe Ruth, never allowing him a home run.
The memory of Eddie Cicotte has faded in the decades after his passing. His farm slowly turned into a subdivision by the 1980s.
The Black Sox story, however, has lived on, and after his passing, Cicotte’s memory got a new life as he was depicted in now-iconic films.
The 1988 film “Eight Men Out” was a retelling of the 1919 World Series Black Sox scandal with an all-star cast. Academy award nominee David Strathairn playing Eddie Cicotte.
The film focused closely on Cicotte’s friendship with Shoeless Joe and his personal guilt over his involvement in the scheme.
A more romantic and mythicized retelling of the Black Sox players was the classic American film “Field of Dreams” (1989). It stars Kevin Coster as an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball field in his corn after hearing the voice saying, “If you build it, he will come.”
The ghosts of the eight Black Sox players, including Cicotte, played by Steve Eastin, return from purgatory to find the field as their own personal “heaven.”
Eddie Cicotte is still in Livonia to this day, currently residing in Parkview Cemetery. I’d like to imagine he’s in heaven, chirping his nemesis, the Babe.
Perhaps he’s playing catch with Shoeless Joe and the rest of the Eight Men Out in a field of strawberries.
Jay Murray is a writer for Michigan Enjoyer and has been a Metro Detroit-based professional investigator for 22 years. Follow him on X @Stainless31.
