[2] Cox first entered the sports world when he headed a group that bought the New York Yankees of the third American Football League in 1941.
After changing the team's name to the New York Americans, Cox's first major splash was signing Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon and complete a backfield tandem with John Kimbrough.
Financially strapped owner Gerald Nugent had barely survived the 1942 season, needing an advance from the league just to go to spring training.
Although long thought to be false based on press accounts of the time,[3] evidence has surfaced that Nugent indeed planned to sell the Phillies to Veeck, only to have Landis step in and engineer the sale to Cox.
At the time Cox took over, the Phillies had been the dregs of the National League for a quarter century; they had finished above .500 only once since 1918, at least in part because the team's owners had been unwilling or unable to spend the money necessary to build a winner.
However, Cox was a very hands-on owner; as Rich Westcott of the Society for American Baseball Research put it, he tried to run the Phillies "with the same strict regimen with which he ran his lumber company."
More importantly in the long run, the farm system had begun developing the players who would help lead the Phillies to the 1950 World Series.
As the investigation progressed, Cox changed his story and admitted making some "sentimental" bets on the Phillies, and he claimed that he didn't know it was against the rules.
Bob Carpenter Sr., scion of the Delaware-based duPont family, bought the team with his son for an estimated $400,000 on Nov. 23, 1943, the same day that Cox was banned.
[8] After a merger with the rival United Soccer Association, eight of the NPSL franchises (the Atlanta Chiefs, Baltimore Bays, Chicago/Kansas City Spurs, Los Angeles/San Diego Toros, New York Generals, Oakland Clippers, St. Louis Stars, and Toronto Falcons) would become part of the North American Soccer League.