SHOELESS JOE JACKSONBy Robert Nishihara
Stats from www.baseball-reference.com I don't know that he actually ever said it was so. Sure, there's a transcript of his Grand Jury testimony. And although that transcript was at one time missing, presumed to have been stolen, it did reappear later and the contents of that testimony have produced more than enough debate over his intentions during the autumn in question. And he was acquitted (along with seven of his teammates) of all charges stemming from the alleged incident. And he did hit .375 in the Series. But there was no denying the money. The damned money couldn't be swept aside. Even if a nation of hopeful baseball fans wanted him to say it wasn't so, the damned money said otherwise. And said it loudly. And for that, Joseph Jefferson Jackson was banned for life from the game that was essentially his life. But before Arnold Rothstein and the cadres of Charlie Comiskey's lawyers and Eddie Cicotte drilling Morrie Rath in the back with a fastball and the dirty stack of cash that would later ruin his life, Joe Jackson was simply a baseball player, and a great one at that. An unrefined country boy from the hills of South Carolina, Jackson learned the game in the rural atmosphere of his home and worked on perfecting his baseball skills there. He lugged around a monstrous 48-ounce game bat he called "Black Betsy" and traveled the Carolina countryside playing in mill games and semi-pro leagues hitting equally monstrous home runs. Playing the game he loved in the place he loved made Jackson loathe ever separating the two. However, when his semi-pro career in Greenville really started to take off, the outside world inevitably came calling. His first major league contract came courtesy of Connie Mack and the Philadelphia A's in 1908. And that 1908 Philadelphia A's squad fielded no less than four future Hall-of-Famers: aging legend Jimmie Collins was playing his final season at third base, a different Collins, Eddie, was in just his third season en route to 3,315 career hits and 744 steals (coincidently, Collins and Jackson would pair up again in 1919 for that fateful season in Chicago), "Gettysburg" Eddie Plank was just over halfway to his 326 career wins, and Charles "Chief" Bender was a season away from a three-year run that would see him go 58-18 with a 1.78 ERA. Despite this star-filled roster, the A's went 68-85 that season and finished 6th, 22 games behind the Detroit Tigers and their 21-year-old star outfielder Ty Cobb. And Joe Jackson missed the South Carolina hills more than ever. Philadelphia was so far from Greenville in both geography and culture to Jackson that the two might as well have been on different continents. And his teammates hazed the rookie mercilessly. By then, a nickname that he hated, "Shoeless Joe", had caught up to him. Whether apocryphal or not, the story was that Jackson had tried to break in a pair of new spikes in a game back in Greenville, and his feet began to blister in the uncomfortable cleats. So, Jackson took them off and played the rest of the game in stocking feet. Whether true or not, the label stuck with Jackson, and the nickname served as an unfriendly dig at his rural background. Miserable in Philadelphia and seeing limited playing time, Jackson simply ran away. Over the course of the next two seasons, Connie Mack had to chase Jackson down several times and bring him back to the team. Finally, the exasperated Mack decided Jackson wasn't worth the trouble and traded his troubled young outfielder to the Cleveland Naps for another outfielder named Bris Lord. As it turned out, Connie Mack was wrong. Even though, in two seasons with the A's, Jackson had a grand total of 6 hits in 40 at-bats, hitting an even .150, much better things were to come shortly for him in Cleveland. Meanwhile, Bris Lord would go on to hit .256 in an 8-year major league career. In 1910, Jackson hit .387 in 20 games for the Naps (from 1903-1914, the Cleveland franchise had been named in honor of star player and eventual manager Napoleon Lajoie; in 1915, the club changed its name to the now-familiar Indians). The following season, 1911, his first full year as a major leaguer, Jackson hit .408, ringing out 233 hits. Whether Cleveland was any better for him culturally than Philadelphia or whether he had simply decided playing in the major leagues was decidedly better than not playing in the major leagues no matter the location, Jackson played diligently and spectacularly for Cleveland. In 1912, Jackson hit .395 with 90 RBI. He also had 44 doubles and 26 triples. And Jackson could run. In 1911, he had stolen 41 bases. In 1912, he had 35 steals. The following season, Jackson had another stellar year at the plate. He hit .373 with 71 RBI, 39 doubles, 17 triples, and 26 steals. Though he had hit .408 in 1911, .395 in 1912, and .373 in 1913, Jackson never won a batting a title. There was this fellow named Cobb in Detroit who always seemed to hit a few points higher. Unbeknownst to Jackson, there was trouble brewing on the South Side of Chicago. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was in the process of putting together a core of talented young players, but he needed another veteran player or two to lead the younger members of the squad. And he was getting impatient for a winner. Unfortunately, Comiskey was notoriously cheap. His miserly ways were well-known throughout the league, and his players were commonly significantly underpaid by peer standards. Though he was not adverse to paying a premium to acquire players, he was incredibly reluctant to pay any sort of premium to the players themselves. And in 1915, Comiskey set his sights on the hard-hitting Cleveland Indian outfielder who had hit .338 with 22 steals the year before. Prior to the start of the 1915 season, Comiskey had purchased the contract of star second baseman Eddie Collins from Philadelphia. With Collins already on board, Comiskey was convinced that the addition of his former teammate Jackson would be enough to make the White Sox a contender. So, Comiskey sent three players and $31,500 in cash to Cleveland for Jackson. But things did not go well in Chicago at first. Jackson hit just .272 for the Sox in 1915, and struck out more times in significantly fewer at-bats than he had for the Indians earlier in the season (11 strikeouts in 303 AB's for Cleveland vs. 12 strikeouts in 158 AB's for Chicago). Comiskey was furious. Not only had he paid a king's ransom for the supposed star outfielder, he knew it was up to Jackson and Collins to carry the team offensively. But the team had done well in 1915, finishing in 3rd. That was up from the 6th place finish they had had in 1914. By 1916, Comiskey expected even bigger results, and he got them. The White Sox chased their nearly opposite monikers, the Boston Red Sox, all summer long for the AL Pennant. And Joe Jackson was leading the charge, hitting .341 with 40 doubles and 21 triples. By season's end, the White Sox finished only a pair games off the pace. In 1917, the White Sox finally fulfilled Comiskey's massive expectations. Though Jackson's average sagged to .301, he was one of only two regulars who hit over .300 (centerfielder Hap Felsch was the other, and Felsch paced the club with 6 homers and 102 RBI). Pitching largely carried the team with veteran Eddie Cicotte and young Lefty Williams leading the team in wins with 28 and 17, respectively. Cicotte was especially brilliant with a league-leading 1.53 ERA and over 346 innings pitched. The White Sox took the AL Pennant that summer by nine games over Boston. In the World Series, Chicago dispatched John McGraw's New York Giants in six games. Jackson hit .304 in the Series with a pair of RBI. But pitcher Red Faber was the star, with three wins. However, despite the World Championship title, the White Sox players were still an unhappy group. Comiskey's lack of financial reciprocity with them over the team's success created bitterness, which Comiskey simply ignored, allowing it to grow unchecked. In 1919, the Sox won the AL Pennant again, and the players' unfiltered resentment of team management turned ugly. In the autumn of 1919, enough had gone wrong and the conditions were bleak enough for something bad to happen. And without anyone willing to stop it, one of baseball's worst moments was simply allowed to happen. The heavily favored White Sox were shocked in eight games by the Cincinnati Reds (1919 was the first year a new best-of-nine World Series format had been put in place). Lackluster play by a number of Sox players, most notably pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, seemed to be the primary reason for the surprising Series loss by Chicago. However, rumblings of suspicious gambling odds started to edge their way into conversations about the Series. Ironically, Jackson had had his best statistical season with Chicago in 1919. In his 3 1ˇ2 season tenure with the club (1918 was lost to military-related activities), Jackson had the highest batting average (.351), most homers (7), and most RBI (96) since he had joined the club. In the Series, Jackson continued his torrid hitting with a .375 average, 6 RBI and the only homer hit by anyone on either club. The 29-year-old Jackson appeared to be at the top of his game. Little did anyone realize he was a little over a year from seeing his career end and his life in ruins. In 1920, a livelier baseball was introduced into play, and the always hard-hitting Jackson saw his power numbers spike. He hit .382 that season with career highs in homers (12) and RBI (121). However, toward the end of the 1920 season, all hell broke loose. Allegations of fixing games during the 1919 World Series exploded across newspaper headlines nationwide. Jackson and six of his teammates were suspended from play for the rest of the 1920 season (first baseman Chick Gandil, the suspected ringleader of the alleged fix, had left baseball after the Series in 1919, leading to further speculation over the validity of play in the Series) and made to face legal charges. What exactly happened during the 1919 World Series was hotly contested then and continues to be mulled over to this day. What is known is that Eddie Cicotte hit Cincinnati leadoff man, Morrie Rath, at the start of Game One as a sign to gamblers in the know that the fix was on. In return for his troubles, Cicotte received a payment prior to Game One to secure his ineffectiveness for the Series' Opener. Lefty Williams was also paid a sum of money to secure his ineffectiveness in the subsequent games he started. And the pair of star pitchers "delivered". Cicotte lost two of the three games he started and Williams lost all three. With Cicotte and Williams doing the heavy lifting, the involvement of the other alleged conspirators remains murky. Buck Weaver hit .324 in the Series, claimed he never accepted any money from the gamblers, and maintained his innocence until the day he died in 1956. Jackson's aforementioned Series numbers do little to show his outright deliberate failure on the field. However, the alleged ringleader of the fix, first baseman Gandil had little need for baseball outside of the money and after he was ousted from the game showed little care about his banishment from the sport. Ditto for shortstop Swede Risberg, who hit a paltry .080 in Series play, with 4 errors in the field. Hap Felsch had similarly poor Series numbers. Felsch was a key hitter in the White Sox lineup, but hit only .192 in the Series and committed a pair of miscues in the field. So, what to make of the six non-pitchers implicated in the scandal: Weaver, Jackson, Gandil, Risberg, Felsch, and utility player Fred McMullin (who had all of two at-bats in the Series)? Judging the intent of each man during those eight games in October, 1919 depends largely in who is to be believed and who isn't. And nearly 90 years later (with all of the players long since deceased) that assessment still doesn't come easy. So, it comes back to the money. Save Weaver, the rest of the players later admitted to having received some of the money paid out by gamblers including the notorious Arnold Rothstein and small-timer Sport Sullivan. And the dirt from that money simply wouldn't wash clean. So, whether or not anyone truly knows if the baseball playing phenom from the South Carolina hills deliberately let a World Championship slip from his fingers we do know that his team lost and he was paid a stack of cold, hard cash while it was happening. Despite a jury finding Jackson and his mates not guilty of their legal charges, newly appointed baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned all eight players (Weaver included) from the major leagues for life. With that, the hard-hitting country boy with the shiny black club for a bat decisively completed his fall from grace. Joe Jackson, baseball star, .356 career hitter was made to vanish off the face of the baseball earth. Though he tried to stay in the shadows of the game, playing in the no-name leagues of his youth, his very name had turned to poison. And so he marked his time as the cursed baseball star, knowing he was so incredibly gifted at something he was never allowed to truly participate in ever again. His was the rarest of blooms made to wither and die on the vine. And it was a process that mercilessly took 30 years to complete. Instead of taking his place with the rest of the game's immortals and leaving behind a wealth of baseball-playing heroics, Jackson has sadly became a cautionary tale, a warning against greed and the prototype for subsequent fallen heroes. All the while, I am not quite sure we really know what actually happened to one of baseball's greatest stars during those eight games in October of 1919. So, whether or not he actually ever said it was so, history has, for better or worse, decidedly made it so.
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