Tell Me About Shoeless Joe by Art McDonald

Billy Evans was an umpire whose skills earned him induction to baseball’s Hall of Fame. He was, at times, a fighter, a baseball executive, and a writer. As a writer, Evans was able to quote Evans the umpire, who said, "To my way of thinking, there was never a greater hitter than Joe Jackson. No hitter had more perfect coordination."

Ty Cobb, the consensus choice as baseball's best hitter, shared Evans’s view. He told Jackson, "Whenever I got the idea I was a good hitter, I'd stop and take a good look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement."

There could be no improving on a moment at the Polo Grounds in 1913. Imagine you are at this early season game between Jackson’s Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees. You expect to see singles and steals and bunts. Home runs are rare (the Yankees hit nine as a team that season) as the ball is as dead as a shot put.

Suddenly you hear a sound unlike any you have heard at a ball game. It is the “thud” of a baseball being crushed. Jackson has seen the ideal pitch and has achieved the perfect combination of natural talent and swing plane and power and weight shift and follow through. You watch as the ball goes out of the stadium. There is a stunned silence, followed by fans simultaneously applauding and asking, “Have you ever seen such a thing?” Perhaps someday Tiger Woods will hit a golf ball 450 yards and elicit the same reactions.

The Polo Grounds was not like Greenville's Municipal Stadium, where home runs do leave the park on occasion. By the time the Polo Grounds closed in 1964, after hosting more than four thousand major-league games—most involving a livelier ball than Jackson hit-- only Babe Ruth had matched Jackson's feat. Ruth had a model for his powerful swing. A fellow named Joe Jackson.

Baseball statistics do not reflect the majesty of Jackson’s hitting, or the beauty of his swing, or the inherent grace of the natural athlete. They can give us an idea of how Jackson compares to others who have played baseball at its highest level, the major leagues.

Statistics tell us Jackson has a higher career batting average than anybody except Cobb and Rogers Hornsby. He is in the top thirty-five in slugging average, the best measure of power. Jackson is one of two players in baseball history (Tris Speaker is the other) to exceed all of the following standards: 200 career stolen bases, a .300 career batting average, a .300 career postseason average, a .400 career on-base average, and a .500 career slugging average. A picture evolves of a man who was outstanding at running, hitting, drawing a walk, hitting for power, and hitting well in the clutch.

Sadly, scandal overshadows all of these achievements. Millions of words have been written on the absence or degree of Jackson's involvement in the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Most of these words are unnecessary. The discussion should end with his hitting .375 in that Series and not making an error.

Some argue that these statistics do not show outs he deliberately made. There is a logical hole here; if Jackson were trying to fail, it would seem most appropriate to do it in a key situation. Yet he hit .435 (10 for 23) in his at bats with his team either leading by or trailing by three runs or less.

That he was acquitted at trial is well known. Less well known is that in his grand jury testimony Jackson denied, under oath, doing anything improper on the field during the 1919 World Series.

He did admit accepting money and assuming it came from inappropriate sources. To Commissioner Landis, this was grounds for a lifetime ban from baseball. Landis, who concurrently meted the same punishment to Jackson’s teammate Buck Weaver for merely knowing of the scandal, had absolute power. He was arguably the last man in America whose decisions were not subject to appeal.

Today these decisions are. Those running baseball need to consider Jackson’s eligibility for the Hall of Fame. They should consider the roles of a sentence in our legal system: punishing, protecting, and deterring.

Jackson endured a lifetime ban from playing professional baseball. He is not eligible for membership in the Hall of Fame. Only the draconian would argue that this is insufficient punishment for Jackson’s off-the-field action. Only the illogical would argue that society needs protection from a man who died in 1951. Only the foolish is going to argue that the possibility of reinstatement in eighty years will make a Hall of Fame-caliber player more likely to fix a game.

VHOF Note: Statue was dedicated in July of 2002.

There is a project underway to build a statue of Greenville’s greatest athlete. You can contribute to this project by making a tax-deductible contribution.

Send your check, made out to the City of Greenville, to The Shoeless Joe Jackson Statue Fund, Office of the Mayor, P.O Box 2207, Greenville, SC, 29602. And then hope that as visitors to our city see the statue, they will wonder why baseball feels that respecting a harsh, out-of-date judgment is more important than recognizing Jackson’s prodigious talent.

Art McDonald, a Greenville resident, is a partner with Tatum CFO Partners LLP