The Reds Hire Pat Moran and Win the 1919 World Series

On January 30, 1919, the Cincinnati Reds hired Pat Moran as their new manager. Christy Mathewson, who had managed the Reds since 1916, was still in France recovering from a poison gas exposure during World War I that would eventually contribute to his death from tuberculosis in 1925. With no word from Mathewson and his health uncertain, the Reds turned to Moran, a former catcher who had managed the Phillies to the 1915 NL pennant.

Moran's first season in Cincinnati produced one of the most famous, and infamous, results in baseball history. The Reds went 96-44, winning the National League by nine games, and then defeated the Chicago White Sox five games to three in the World Series. Only later did the full story emerge: eight White Sox players had conspired with gamblers to throw the Series. The resulting scandal led to lifetime bans for the conspirators and the appointment of Kenesaw Mountain Landis as baseball's first commissioner.

The 1919 Reds were a genuinely strong team that has been unfairly overshadowed by the scandal. Third baseman Heinie Groh, outfielder Edd Roush, and pitcher Slim Sallee led a roster that won the pennant comfortably before any games were fixed.

On this same date in 1978, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn vetoed a trade that would have sent pitcher Vida Blue from the Oakland Athletics to the Cincinnati Reds for first baseman Dave Revering and $1.75 million. The deal had been announced at the Winter Meetings the previous December, but Kuhn ruled that Oakland had not received adequate compensation and that the transaction amounted to a sale of talent rather than a genuine baseball trade. It was one of several transactions Kuhn blocked involving cash-strapped A's owner Charlie Finley, who had tried to sell Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million two years earlier.