In December 1951, as Joseph Jefferson “Shoeless Joe” Jackson lay dying in Greenville, S.C., far from the game that made his name a pariah’s mark in American sports, he proclaimed that he didn’t deserve “this thing that’s happened to me.”
“I’m going to meet the greatest ump, and he knows I’m innocent,” Jackson reportedly said.
Like much of what we know of Jackson, the brilliant left-fielder who departed the game with a lifetime .356 batting average, that remark may be apocryphal. Yet, like much of the apocryphal information we carry with us about Jackson, a man more known from being mythologized in literature and movies than from reality, one wonders where in that knowledge is the grain of truth and how large is that grain.
Jackson, accused of helping to fix the 1919 World Series, was, along with seven of his White Sox teammates, banned from baseball for life in 1921 by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The Black Sox scandal remains an epic stain on America’s pastime, and Jackson, he of “Say it ain’t so, Joe” infamy, is its foremost symbol.
Now, 47 years after Jackson’s death, another of baseball’s icons, Hall of Famer Ted Williams, is spearheading the latest campaign to get Jackson, a player who even his critics admit was one of the greatest ever, into baseball’s Hall of Fame.
“He was never convicted in court of anything wrong,” said Williams. “His record in the Series would definitely prove he didn’t play to lose that Series. My only great concern is–and I never met Joe Jackson–that I love this game so much that I can’t believe baseball would have done anything wrong in any way. But maybe, in Jackson’s case, judging a man who was never proven guilty in a court of law, it has done something unfair.”
In making his case on Jackson’s behalf, Williams–along with Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller–has put forth a novel argument for ending Jackson’s banishment from the Hall of Fame: Jackson’s lifetime ban should have ended with his death.
Chicago attorney Louis Hegeman, at the behest of Williams and Feller, has prepared a 28-page memorandum supporting Jackson’s candidacy and forwarded it to Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame.
Rather than debate guilt or innocence, Hegeman’s memo argues the simple supposition that, regardless of what Jackson may or may not have done in 1919, he has served his sentence and so cannot be kept on “this penal list.”
“If you look at it in the worst light, the man served it in full, without a minute’s time off,” Hegeman said. “Joe Jackson served every bitter moment. He ceased to be a person in 1951.”
The memorandum is being studied by attorneys for Major League Baseball, spokesman Rich Levin said. The document concludes: ” `Shoeless Joe’ Jackson completed his sentence in 1951 and thus paid his debt to the national game in full.”
The history of the Black Sox scandal is complex, having to do with some of the seamier history of baseball’s early days. It involves an owner, Charlie Comiskey, whom University of Hartford historian Warren Goldstein called “a skinflint and an SOB,” and who mistreated and underpaid his players.
It involves Landis, a former federal judge known for his harsh and, many argue, unfair rulings against any defendant who he felt threatened society’s status quo. It involved at least three groups of gamblers, including Arnold Rothstein, a figure who would later show up early in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
At least two key points about the Shoeless Joe controversy are not in dispute. Jackson did take $5,000, although the money came from a fellow player, not directly from a gambler. And Jackson did play extraordinarily well in the Series, hitting the only home run, going errorless in the field, and setting a mark for total hits in a Series not broken until 1964.
“One record that is totally objective is the box score,” Hegeman said.
Hegeman argues that Jackson was “probably guilty of a moral lapse in judgment,” though he “certainly wasn’t guilty of a crime.”
In fact, Jackson was twice found not guilty in a court of law. The second trial, in Milwaukee in 1924, forced Comiskey to pay some of Jackson’s back salary, which amounted to $9,000 a year when he was banned. Comiskey suspended the eight players toward the end of the 1920 season. At the time Jackson was hitting .382.
“Baseball just struck down one of the great careers of all time in a 5-minute public announcement to the press without the benefit of due process,” Hegeman said.
Over the 78 seasons since his banishment, and particularly in recent years, Jackson, an illiterate South Carolina millworker’s son who, by all testimony, had a gentle manner and devilish talent, has been fleshed out largely by myth.
At the center of such books and movies as “Eight Men Out” and especially “Field of Dreams,” Jackson–who allegedly gained his nickname after removing a too-tight pair of shoes and playing barefoot in a semipro game–has in recent years come to be seen less as a symbol of baseball’s corruption and more as a relic of America’s lost innocence.
Over the years numerous efforts have been mounted in Jackson’s defense. One, spurred by the popularity of “Field of Dreams,” saw the South Carolina Legislature petition Bart Giamatti, baseball’s commissioner at the time, to lift the ban. Giamatti, a former president of Yale University, was a scholar with a touch of the romantic in him, seemingly the perfect man to see the flawed hero in Jackson.
“People love the underdog, and Joe was certainly that,” said W.P. Kinsella, author of “Shoeless Joe,” the novel on which “Field of Dreams” was based. “And people have been so obstinate about helping him. We had great hopes that Bart Giamatti would do something, and he said he wasn’t going to. It was the heavy hand of Commissioner Landis coming down again.”
“Giamatti’s opinion at the time, and I’m paraphrasing, was he didn’t want to be put in a position to play God and rewrite history,” Levin said.
Baseball, perhaps in part because of the banning of Pete Rose in 1989 for gambling, is loathe to open this question: If Jackson can be considered for reinstatement, why can’t Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader?
Williams’ answer is that Jackson’s case has “nothing to do with Pete Rose.”
But at a time when baseball is beset by a multitude of troubles, from possible new labor unrest to falling revenues to a dwindling fan base, others are not so sure.
Besides, Bud Selig, baseball’s acting commissioner, is perhaps the weakest ever in that office. For Selig to take the controversial position of lifting Jackson’s ban is unthinkable to many, if for no other reason than that every person supporting Jackson is matched by someone supporting the ban.
Less impressed with Jackson’s mythic stature, his opponents argue that he took a $5,000 bribe before the Series and that, even if he led all hitters with a .375 Series average while rapping out a record 12 hits, at the very least he knew the fix was in and did nothing about it.
“He may not have been able to read or write, but he could count,” said Jerome Holtzman, a longtime Chicago Tribune baseball writer now serving on the Hall of Fame’s Veterans Committee, the group that would have to approve Jackson’s admission. “I don’t think he should be in. He was in on the fix.”
Goldstein, a consultant on Ken Burns’ video history of baseball, said that, after much thought, he has come down on the side of Jackson’s exclusion.
“Forgiveness is tough,” he said. “I believe in it, but I am somehow uncomfortable in this case.”
Goldstein said the idea that “baseball has a moral compass strikes me as absurd.” Yet he also believes what Jackson did was “deeply wrong,” striking at the very heart of the game.
“His defenders, it seems to me, try to skirt his wrongdoing,” Goldstein said.
Williams refuses to argue guilt or innocence, saying only that Jackson deserves “a pathway of redemption.”
“For 40 years I’ve known about Joe Jackson,” said Williams, who still keeps a baseball bat in the kitchen of his home in Citrus Hills, Fla. “The fellow who was most responsible for me being with the Red Sox is Eddie Collins, and Eddie Collins was on that (White Sox) team. One day, I asked him about Joe Jackson. It was like he was looking in the sky, and then he said, `Boy, what a player.’ “
But with Williams, there seems to be something more going on than a conversation with the long-dead Collins, the White Sox second baseman in 1919 and one of the players not tied to the scandal.
Jackson, whose career batting average of .356 is the third highest ever, was a hitter so dominant that both Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, two of the game’s greatest players who had undisguised enmity for each other, agreed that he had the “sweetest swing” either had ever seen. In fact, Ruth admitted to patterning his swing after Jackson’s.
If Jackson was the greatest hitter of baseball’s “dead-ball era,” known to hit “blue darters” that could strip the glove from a fielder’s hand, then Ruth, his admirer, was the greatest left-handed hitter of them all. And who was the greatest left-handed hitter to follow Ruth? Most would say none other than Williams, who once got Ruth to autograph a ball at the 1941 All-Star Game.
From Jackson to Ruth to Williams, the line is an unbroken thread through baseball’s past.
“This is Teddy Ballgame’s last game,” said Hegeman, using Williams’ nickname. “He is amazing about this. It keeps him alive. He might just push this one over, the `last hit up the box’ as he puts it.”
Will Williams push it over? Will Williams, one of the sport’s true icons, succeed in righting what he sees as a monstrous wrong?
“I would feel very good about it personally,” he said. “The thing that bothered me more than anything else about Joe Jackson was, I always wondered if he got an unjust or too-severe penalty. The thing of it is, I would like to be there when he was inducted. I think a lot of baseball fans–not from sympathy, but because a wrong needs to be righted–would like to see him go in.”
“He served his sentence. He was cleared in a court of law. Justice! There has to be some way in baseball that a fellow that serves his sentence and wants to come back in the game can come back.”
For the moment, Jackson remains an outsider.
In Cooperstown, N.Y., the site of baseball’s Hall of Fame, 223 players are enshrined, along with artifacts, photographs and memorabilia, the vast historical residue of the game. Among those exhibits is a detailed time line on which the 1919 Black Sox scandal is discussed.
There, the players, in all their dusty and aged infamy, are represented by a singular exhibit: the shoes of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson.
