"Well, the beans are all spilled and I think that I am through with baseball. I got my five thousand and I suppose the others got theirs, too. If you say anything about me, don't make it appear that I'm trying to put up an alibi. I'm not. I'm as guilty as any of them. We all were in it alike.

              "I don't know what I'm going to do now. I have been a ballplayer during the best years of my life, and I never got into any other kind of business. I'm going to hell, I guess. I intend to hang around Chicago awhile until I see how this thing is going to go. Then, maybe, I'll go back to Milwaukee.

              "I wish that I hadn't gone into it. I guess we all do. We have more than earned the few dollars they gave us for turning crooked. All this season the memory of the World Series has been hanging over us. The talk that we threw games this year is bunk. We knew we were suspected and we tried to be square. But a guy can't be crooked part of the time and square the rest of the time. We knew that sooner or later somebody was going to turn up the whole deal.

              "Cicotte's story is true in every detail. I don't blame him for telling. He knew the Grand Jury had a case against him and there wouldn't have been any object in holding out. He did the best thing to do under the circumstances. I was ready to confess myself yesterday, but I didn't have the courage to be the first to tell. I never knew where my five thousand came from. It was left in my locker at the clubhouse and there was always a good deal of mystery about the way it was dealt out. That was one of the reasons why we never knew who double-crossed us on the split of the hundred thousand. It was to have been an even split. But we never got it.

              "Who was responsible for the double cross I couldn't say. I suspect Gandil because he was the wisest one of the lot and had sense enough to get out of baseball before the crash came. But I have heard since that it was Abe Attell. Maybe it was Attell. I don't know him, but I had heard that he was mixed up with the gamblers who were backing us to lose.

              "I didn't want to get in on the deal at first. I had always received square treatment from 'Commy' and it didn't look quite right to throw him down. But when they let me in on the idea, too many men were involved. I didn't like to be a squealer and I knew that if I stayed out of the deal and said nothing about it they would go ahead without me and I'd be that much money out without accomplishing anything. I'm not saying this to pass the buck to the others. I suppose that if I had refused to enter the plot and had stood my ground I might have stopped the whole deal. We all share the blame equally.

              "I'm not saying that I double-crossed the gamblers, but I had nothing to do with the loss of the World Series. The breaks just came so that I was not given a chance to throw the game. The records show that I played a pretty good game. I know I missed one terrible fly ball, but you can believe me or not, I was trying to catch that ball. I lost it in the sun and made a long run for it, and looked foolish when it fell quite a bit away from where it ought to be. The other men in the know thought that I had lost the ball deliberately and that I was putting on a clown exhibition. They warned me after the game to be more careful about the way I muffed flies.

              "Whether I could actually have gotten up enough nerve to carry out my part in throwing the game I can't say. The gold looked good to all of us, and I suppose we could have gone ahead with the double cross. But as I said, I was given no chance to decide. When we went into that conference in Cicotte's room, he said that it would be easy for us to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, that we were expert ballplayers, and that we could throw the game scientifically. It looked easy to me, too. It's just as easy for a good ballplayer to miss a ball as it is to catch it--just a slow start or a stumble at the right time or a slow throw and the job is done. But you can't get away with that stuff indefinitely. You may be able to fool the public, but you can't fool yourself."

              (Reutlinger) "How did Cicotte get ten thousand dollars?"

              "Because he was wise enought to stand pat for it, that's all. Cicotte had brains. The rest of us roundheads just took their word for the proposition that we were to get an even split on the hundred thousand. Cicotte was going to make sure of his share from the jump off. He made them come across with it.

              "As for hiring a lawyer and putting up a defense in this case, I haven't made any plans. I haven't talked to anybody about this case but you, and I want to see Weaver and Williams before arranging for a defense.

              "I got five thousand dollars. I could have got just about that much by being on the level if the Sox had won the Series. And now I'm out of baseball--the only profession I knew anything about, and a lot of gamblers have gotten rich. The joke seems to be on us."