Like Banquo`s ghost, Shoeless Joe Jackson is still a presence at every World Series, at least for one fan.
”I have an image of him standing in the background every year,” says Paul Green, a baseball writer from Wisconsin.
”I think it`s an image that clouds every Series. Joe won`t go away.
”I know I get calls from reporters about him at this time every year, and so do other people I know who`ve been working to clear his name. After all, the World Series was the stage on which the drama was played out.”
Jackson has been dead for 37 years; if he were alive, he`d be 101. The last game he played in the major leagues was almost 70 years ago.
But, as Green says, Joe won`t go away, though most of those who saw him play have long since departed. Some of those early witnesses spoke of being captivated by his grace. At 6 feet 2 inches and 185 pounds, he moved like a big cat. His arm was a marvel; he once won a throwing contest with Babe Ruth and Tris Speaker by rifling the ball 396 feet.
His hitting, however, set him apart. Ruth said it was Jackson`s style he emulated; Eddie Collins said there was no one better; Big Ed Walsh said he hit the ball harder than anyone; Walter Johnson called him ”the greatest natural ballplayer I`ve ever seen.”
His lifetime batting average of .356 is surpassed only by Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby, both of whom-like Ruth, Speaker, Collins, Walsh and Johnson-are in baseball`s Hall of Fame.
But Jackson isn`t. He left the game in disgrace, having been banished from professional baseball for his involvement with seven teammates on the Chicago White Sox who were accused of cooperating with gamblers in throwing the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, which branded them forever as the Black Sox.
If Jackson cheated, he did it subtly, for during that tainted Series he led both teams in batting with a .375 average, hit the only home run, batted in five runs, fielded flawlessly and threw out what would have been the winning run in game 6, a game the Sox went on to win.
His detractors have an answer for this: Joe was too dumb to know how to take a dive. The prevailing wisdom has it that, sure, Jackson was a great player, but he also was an ignorant hayseed who broke the law and deserved what he got.
Despite everything, Joe Jackson never has disappeared from the national memory. Indeed, this last season has been the best he has had in a long time, good enough maybe to make him comeback player of the year, outcast division;
and his legend is likely to spread even further when the movie ”Shoeless Joe,” which stars Kevin Costner, is released next spring.
Jackson was a central figure in last summer`s ”Eight Men Out,” the John Sayles film about the Black Sox scandal, based on Eliot Asinof`s 1963 book of the same name, now in paperback.
This month, another book about Jackson, ”Say It Ain`t So, Joe,” by Donald Gropman, published in 1979, has been reissued in paperback. Thursday the Chicago Historical Society is unveiling the exhibit ” `Say It Ain`t So, Joe`: The 1919 Black Sox Scandal.”
Jackson was the model for ”The Natural,” Bernard Malamud`s 1952 novel that four years ago was made into a movie starring Robert Redford.
Jackson`s enduring hold on the imagination can be explained by his extraordinary talent and by the myth and mystery that envelop his story and enlarge it to more than a mere sports yarn. On one level, it is a modern rendering of Greek tragedy-the fall of a hero. On another, it is an American morality tale about power and greed. For Gropman, Green and their fellow advocates, the case of Joseph Jefferson Jackson has become a crusade.
They believe that although the `19 Series was fixed, Jackson did not take part and was an innocent victim in a larger conspiracy by members of the baseball establishment and their lawyers. This view coincides at several points with Asinof`s, though ”Eight Men Out” perpetuates the stereotype of Jackson as a guilty, if sympathetic, bumpkin.
”Two juries, in criminal and civil trials, found Joe Jackson innocent,” Gropman says. ”But the baseball commissioner banned Jackson even before the first verdict. Baseball should either provide proof that Jackson was guilty or reinstate him.” Gropman also sees the Jackson story as an example of how sportswriters of that day, out of laxity or malice, routinely twisted facts in their intent to make everyone a good guy or a bad guy.
Jackson, a Southerner who could neither read nor write, always was vulnerable to ridicule. After his 1920 indictment, the press attacked, and the perceptions from those times have persisted, serving as the lens through which most people now see Joe Jackson.
Take the nickname.
”I read literally hundreds of newspaper articles, and Jackson wasn`t referred to as `Shoeless Joe` after he made the majors until after the scandal broke,” Gropman says. ”Before that, he was most often called `Gen. Joe` or
`Jax.` Two early nicknames were `the Carolina Confection` and `the Candy Kid from Carolina.` ”
”Shoeless Joe,” Gropman says, was coined in 1908 by Scoop Latimer, the sports editor for the Greenville (S.C.) News when Jackson was with the local minor league team. Jackson reportedly played several innings of a game in his stocking feet because a new pair of baseball shoes gave him blisters. Later, writers invented the fiction that he used to play the game barefoot in the Carolina hills.
”Joe Jackson was portrayed as a crook and a yokel, neither of which bears up under examination,” says David Carlson, a Chicago lawyer. ”He may have been illiterate, but he was no dummy. He was streetwise, he had a very good head; he would turn out to be successful in several businesses.”
Carlson has devoted more than 1,000 hours to reading everything he could find about the events that threatened the credibility of baseball.
”There`s been a lot written,” he says. ”Most of it is not very good;
most is based on confused, incomplete, inaccurate assumptions.
”What you find in studying this case is that the White Sox management orchestrated a clever and successful cover-up. But unlike Richard Nixon and his men, they didn`t get caught.”
The conductor of the cover-up, Carlson says, was Charles Comiskey, the Sox owner, assisted by his attorney, Alfred Austrian.
”It`s my opinion that six, not eight, players were involved in the fix,” Carlson says. ”The two not involved were Jackson and (George) `Buck`
Weaver.”
Though Jackson admitted receiving $5,000 and confessed to a grand jury, Carlson is convinced of Jackson`s innocence. The confession, which Jackson later disavowed, was contradictory, Carlson says. Jackson, he says, also tried to report the money to Comiskey, but something else more sinister apparently was going on behind the scenes.
”The twists and turns and duplicity in this case are incredible,”
Carlson says. ”The players, guilty or innocent, were pawns, and their fate was incidental to the larger issues.”
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Jackson was born, probably in 1887, though the exact year is uncertain, near Greenville, S.C., in one of the villages built around cotton mills in that area. As a child, Joe worked for the Brandon Mill, as did his father.
The mills had moved their operations to the South from the North to avoid unions, but they found that many rural people they trained, unhappy with being confined in huge factories among deafening machinery, did not stay long.
The owners tried tying the employees down with debt to company stores, by organizing churches and by bringing in social workers. But the answer to the desired stability, they finally discovered, was baseball.
Joe joined the Brandon team in the mill league when he was 13, which was unusually young. His teammates, for the most part, were grown men, but he soon established himself as the best player in the region.
When Greenville was granted a minor league team in 1908, Jackson was the first to sign a contract. After he hit over .350, Connie Mack, the owner-manager of the Philadelphia Athletics in the new American League, beckoned Jackson to his team toward the close of the season.
Already the Sporting News, baseball`s bible, had reported enthusiastically about the ”Southern whirlwind who is to be Ty Cobb`s rival of the future.” But at the last minute, the gentle, soft-spoken Jackson, intimidated by the prospect of ”those big Northern cities,” decided to stay home.
Efforts to change his mind were trumpeted in a crescendo of headlines. When he at last took the field in 1908, the expectations did not seem exaggerated: The first time he came to the plate, wielding his storied ebony bat, Black Betsy, he drove in a run with a line-drive single.
But his apprehension of the metropolis seemed well-taken. Envious of the rookie`s publicity, some teammates humiliated Jackson by taking him to dinner and persuading him to drink from a finger bowl, laughing him out of the hotel dining room. The next day he returned home.
He wound up playing five games that season and five at the end of the next year before Mack traded him to Cleveland, where he played 20 games in the last weeks of the 1910 season, hitting .387. In those three years he also was the leading hitter in three minor leagues.
In 1911, his first full season in the majors, he hit .408, second to Cobb`s .420. But Jackson`s difficulty in adapting to urban life and his coarse background led some writers to picture him as a cowardly dullard, even if he were a gifted athlete.
Baseball writer Joe Williams recalled that in spring training that year Hugh Fullerton, a colleague who would figure prominently in the Black Sox saga, had predicted that Jackson`s illiteracy would cause him to fail in baseball.
Though few players have hit .400 or better-none since 1941-Jackson`s accomplishment was stained by a story that became part of baseball lore, appearing in the autobiographies of Cobb and sportswriter Grantland Rice.
In both accounts, Cobb trailed Jackson in the batting race going into the final six games of the season between their two teams, but the cunning Cobb devised a way to psych out his fellow Southerner.
As Cobb told it, he refused to greet Jackson before each game, as was his custom, and continued to ignore him or snarl at him between innings. Demoralized, Jackson was unable to hit, while Cobb was almost unstoppable, in the process passing Jackson and winning the batting title.
”This never happened,” Gropman says. ”Jackson was never ahead of Cobb in batting all year, and when they met in the next-to-last series of that season, Jackson outhit Cobb, going 3-for-8 to Cobb`s 3-for-10.
”That fable typifies much of the press that Joe received. That theme would later paint him as a patsy in the Black Sox scandal. When I began researching my book on Joe, I assumed he was guilty, but as I dug deeper, I saw I was wrong.”
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John Lovell, special counsel to the Los Angeles County district attorney, has taken a different tack but has reached the same conclusion.
”There is no question in my mind that Jackson was not involved in the fix and should be in the Hall of Fame,” Lovell says.
” `Eight Men Out` raised more questions than it answered about Jackson for me,” he says. ”So I analyzed all the newspaper stories about the games, which were quite detailed, and re-created every play.
”There`s a play in the fourth game that`s revealing: Eddie Cicotte, one of the fixers, is pitching. In the 5th inning, Duncan of Cincinnati reaches first on Cicotte`s error. Kopf then singles, Duncan stopping at second.
”Neale doubles to left field, where Jackson is playing. Jackson throws the ball toward home plate to stop Duncan from scoring. In reading every account, there`s no doubt that Jackson`s throw will beat Duncan to the plate. But Cicotte reaches up, knocks the ball down, picks it up and throws toward second base, where Neale is heading, but his throw goes into the outfield. Duncan and Kopf score, and the Reds win, 2-0.
”Go to Cicotte`s state of mind. If Jackson were in on the fix, he has no reason to cut off the throw because he knows it will be wild enough not to get Duncan. But judging by Cicotte`s actions, he must be thinking, `Joe`s not part of it. I`ve got to do it myself.` ” The Reds` victory gave them a 3-1 lead in games.
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What about Jackson`s confession?
”It`s more a protestation of innocence than a confession of guilt,”
lawyer Carlson says. ”My opinion is that Austrian, who the players believed was their lawyer but in fact was representing Comiskey, told the players what to say. I believe he and Comiskey hoped to have the players confess to being slightly guilty so that, as had happened in the past, the matter would blow over with a slap on the wrist for everybody.”
Gambling was pervasive in baseball in that period, Carlson says. Gamblers consorted with players and owners, and fixed games were not unheard of, though organized baseball tried to frame the Black Sox scandal as an aberration, he says.
”I think what happened is that (Arnold) `Chick` Gandil, the player who was architect of the fix, was trying to market the scheme to the gamblers,”
Lovell says.
”First, he had to have the pitchers. He did; he had Cicotte and (Claude) `Lefty` Williams. Second, he needed the hitting stars. That`s when he tossed in the names of Jackson and Weaver.”
Weaver hit .324 in the Series, fielded superbly, later admitted knowledge of the conspiracy but denied participation and unsuccessfully requested a separate trial.
”The baseball establishment will say Joe had `guilty knowledge` of the scheme,” Lovell says, ”but Comiskey had detailed knowledge after the first game and spent the entire next season trying to cover it up.”
According to Gropman, Jackson may not have blown the whistle because of loyalty or fear. ”But Jackson said he had asked Comiskey to keep him out of the Series.”
Says Gropman: ”Jackson said Gandil approached him about the fix on two occasions. Each time Jackson said he refused to go along, but when he said
`no` the second time, Gandil replied, `You might as well say `yes,` or say
`no` and play ball, or anything you want.` ”
Carlson says the richest source for his research was a 1924 civil suit brought by Jackson against Comiskey in Milwaukee to collect the salary from the last two years of a three-year contract, which Comiskey had refused to pay when Jackson was barred from baseball.
According to testimony there and also at the criminal trial in Chicago in 1921, in which all eight players were found not guilty, Jackson never attended a single meeting among the conspirators.
And the $5,000? Jackson testified that a drunken Williams tried to give him the money in Jackson`s hotel room after the last game of the Series, but he refused to accept it and left the room. When he returned, he said, Williams was gone but an envelope with the cash was on the floor. ”Jackson said he took the money with him the next morning when he went to Comiskey`s office at the ballpark to tell Comiskey what happened but that he was turned away by Harry Grabiner, Comiskey`s secretary,” Gropman says.
”Grabiner denies this,” Carlson says, ”but in the civil trial Jackson`s lawyer introduced a letter that Jackson`s wife had written for him to Comiskey after Jackson returned to his home in Savannah, Ga. In it Jackson offered to come to Chicago and talk about what had happened in the Series. Jackson said he discussed the $5,000 when Grabiner came to Savannah in February, 1920, ostensibly to get Jackson to sign a three-year contract. But Grabiner could have been trying to see what Jackson might do; he`d never come to Savannah about a contract before.”
In September, 1920, near the close of a season in which Jackson hit .382, the newspapers exploded with reports of an investigation of the `19 Series. The undisclosed impetus for the inquiry, Carlson says, was a power struggle between Comiskey and Ban Johnson, the league president.
”It`s my theory that Austrian and Comiskey wanted Jackson to confess so they could compromise him,” Carlson says.
”Jackson was in the unique position of substantially embarrassing Comiskey by telling of his attempts to inform him of the fix. If Jackson were indicted, however, he would be discredited. I think the evidence supports this theory.”
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After his first season with the Sox in 1916, the Sporting News praised Jackson:
”Unlettered and unlearned in the ways of the world when he broke into the limelight a few years back, he is today a person in whose company one finds pleasure and profit, a gentleman of manners, at ease in any gathering, his homely wisdom a delight to those who meet him, and his sheer honesty and straightforwardness a relief in these sordid times.”
In 1920, as Jackson`s troubles mounted, the tone changed. Hugh Fullerton resurrected the old fable (”A major league team was forced to hog-tie him to get shoes on him”), then went for the jugular: ”There came a day when a crook spread money before this ignorant idol and he fell.”
Fullerton`s column contained the legendary encounter between Jackson and a boy described as being among the spectators outside the Criminal Courts Building in Chicago, where Jackson had appeared before a grand jury. As Jackson exited, the kid, according to Fullerton, said, ”It ain`t so, Joe, is it?”
”Yes, kid, I`m afraid it is,” Joe purportedly replied.
Jackson denied the exchange took place. ”There weren`t any words passed between anybody except me and a deputy sheriff,” he said. Says Lovell:
”Writers in that era fabricated stories and quotes. The whole business of
`Say it ain`t so, Joe` was clearly made up by Fullerton.”
In a 1979 review of Gropman`s book, Chicago novelist James T. Farrell saluted Fullerton for proving ”he could outsob any of the sob sisters of journalism of the time. . . . I personally doubt that such an incident occurred, but at this date the story is beyond proof or disproof.”
In ”My Baseball Diary,” Farrell tells how, as a boy, he was at Comiskey Park on Sept. 26, 1920, and waited with other boys and men to watch the players leave the clubhouse after the game.
When Jackson and centerfielder Happy Felsch appeared, both implicated in the unfolding scandal, the crowd surged toward them.
”They were both big men,” Farrell writes. ”Jackson was the taller of the two and Felsch the broader. They were sportively dressed in gray silk shirts, white duck trousers and white shoes. They came down the clubhouse steps slowly, their faces masked by impassivity.”
The crowd followed them under the stands to the right-field exit on the 35th Street side of the park. Suddenly, Farrell relates, one of the fans cried: ”It ain`t true, Joe!”
Neither player responded; the crowd began to repeat the cry: ”It ain`t true, Joe! It ain`t true, Joe!”
The crowd followed the players out onto a soccer field behind the bleachers. Farrell writes: ”Soon Felsch and Jackson drove out in their sportive roadsters, through a double file of silent fans.”
