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The Deadball Files: Book 6
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Field of Schemes
Matters come to a head in the concluding episode of The Deadball Files.
Baseball sleuth Adam Wallace finds himself on two seemingly independent quests. The Hall of Fame asks him to research the details of the very first Congressional Baseball Game -- now an annual charitable event in the nation's capital -- for a new exhibit on baseball and politics. And the Commissioner of Baseball asks him to examine the newly legitimized relationship between Major League Baseball and companies that facilitate gambling on the games. His tasks have more in common than he had realized, and neither leads quite where he had expected.
Adam uncovers a lot of information about that first game on Capitol Hill, played in 1909, right down to the official box score, and he's well on his way to telling a tale of how a powerful politician used baseball to help relieve the tension that had been building in the House of Representatives when he realizes that a protagonist of that story, former major league pitcher and then congressman John Tener, provides a bridge to the Commissioner's concerns. As Governor of Pennsylvania Tener later launched a national campaign against gambling in baseball, which led to his selection as president of the National League not long before the Black Sox scandal.
As for the gambling in the game today? That quest takes Adam from the streets of the Lower East Side to the mountains of Costa Rica, and in the end it leads straight to... Oops. Almost gave it away!