A shoeless, clueless schmo

Sporting News, The, April 12, 1999 by Dave Kindred

To call Jackson `unmatched' is to invite skepticism; Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were among Jackson's contemporaries. To speak of the `dignity' Jackson brought to the game is to lose credibility; Jackson brought disgrace.

Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose belong in baseball's Hall of Fame. What they did off the field has nothing to do with what they did between the lines.

It's ludicrous to keep those bad boys out when the Hall already is littered with guttersnipes of every persuasion short of ax-murderers and habitual viewers of the Jerry Springer Show.

I bring this up because every April somebody fires up the Shoeless Joe bandwagon. This time it's Tom Harkin, a U.S. senator from Iowa. He has asked major league baseball to remove Jackson from the "permanently ineligible" list. That way Jackson could be elected to Cooperstown.

As to why an Iowan cares about a ballplayer from South Carolina, the answer is at once sweetly sentimental and utterly mindless. It's the movie, Field of Dreams. Iowans loved the corny movie made in their cornfields. They really liked the scene in winch me ghost of Shoeless Joe asks, "Is tins heaven?" A farmer says, "No, it's Iowa."

A fool for sentiment, I too loved the movie. But I never thought it had anything to do with reality. Apparently, the senator is easier to please.

Harkin told commissioner Bud Selig he's going to bat for Jackson because the "issue is of great importance to my constituents ... as well as baseball fans across America." The senator also said Jackson's "athletic abilities on the diamond were matched, and the dignity he brought to the game was vital to baseball's growing popularity."

His intent is pure, but the senator needs to study up. To call Jackson "unmatched" is to invite skepticism; Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb were among Jackson's contemporaries. To speak of the "dignity" Jackson brought to the game is to lose credibility; Jackson brought disgrace.

Unlike Rose, who exchanged money with gamblers, Jackson took gamblers' money. Promised $20,000, he took a first payment of $5,000, a year's salary for most players. He took it knowing it was payment for intentionally losing games in the 1919 World Series.

Jackson partisans spin a nice story. They say Shoeless Joe was an illiterate country rube lured by sharpies into a gambling scheme. Someone left money that he tried to return. We always hear how well he played, no errors, a record 12 hits, a .375 average with one home run and six runs batted in. The image is of a poor sucker forced to take money who then did nothing to earn it.

Poor sucker, maybe. Lured in, maybe. But Jackson's 12 years in the big leagues had taught him to like money; he was ripe for the picking. Eliot Asinof's classic book, Eight Men Out, tells of a Jackson who came to the seventh game of a best-of-me World Series confused and troubled:

"All week, Joe Jackson had been a disappointment to himself, playing ball with only a part of himself working. He tried to hit, he didn't try to hit. Half the time, he didn't know whether he was trying or not. He had taken only one real vidous cut at the ball with his famous black bat and conveniently failed to make contact The $5,000 Lefty Williams had handed him in that old envelope was part payment for his lethargy...."

The White Sox lost in eight games. The next fall, a grand jury indicted pitchers Ed Cicotte and Lefty Williams, first baseman Chick Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver, utility man Fred McMullin, center fielder Happy Felsch and left fielder Joe Jackson.

"I am an honest ballplayer," a whiskeyed-up Jackson said in a desperate telephone call to a municipal court judge.

"I don't believe you," the judge replied. "I know you're not."

Jackson's words, in sworn testimony as well as in interviews, were often contradictory. Historian Robert Smith says Jackson spoke with "all the ringing sincerity of a crook who feels utterly confident of his cover."

The trial was a sham. Player confessions disappeared even as a prominent member of the district attorney's staff switched sides to the defense table. The jury was charged with finding not that players had thrown games, but that they had conspired to defraud the public--whatever that might mean.

"And when the jury brought in its not-guilty verdict," Smith wrote of that moment late in 1921, "all 12 of the good men and true joined with the ballplayers in a celebration party that lasted most of the night."

Baseball's new commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, acted harshly. He said, "Regardless of the verdicts of juries, no player who throws a game, no player that undertakes or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball."

Those eight Black Sox never played again, as Pete Rose has never been allowed in baseball since his banishment by commissioner Bart Giamatti in 1989.

Pariahs both, Rose and Jackson belong in the darknesses of their own creation. They also belong in the Hall of Fame. They were extraordinary players whose absence diminishes the game's history. Just put the sad stories on their plaques. Let them read as cautionary tales.