Shoeless Joe

Two of the poems I most admire are very short. One is simply a name – Shoeless Joe Jackson. Read it aloud and feel the assonance and alliteration. The other is a phrase Say it ain’t so, Joe, delivered sadly, with its final rhyme. There is a mythic quality in both of these poems.

The name, Shoeless Joe Jackson; the actual historic figure born in the rural South; his bat, Black Betsy, and his role in the 1919 Black Sox Scandal; the wounded plea of a small boy on the courthouse steps; and baseball itself-are all the stuff of mythology. And mythology is sort of a hanging curveball for writers and film-makers.

Born in Pickens County, South Carolina, around 1888, give or take a year (the Jackson family Bible, which recorded such events, was destroyed in a fire) Joe Jackson, by all accounts, was a remarkable natural athlete.

Donald Gropman’s 1979 biography Say It Ain’t So, Joe! contains most of the details of Jackson’s life, although it is scarcely an unbiased account. Jackson was Gropman’s immigrant father’s favorite player, and although the author spent extensive time with interviews and yellowed newspaper clippings-his work is essentially a tall tale with tragic overtones, a glorification of Jackson’s abilities and a defense of a player whose illiteracy and Southern background led to shabby treatment from the press even before the Scandal. Gropman is unwavering in his belief that Jackson’s claim (supposedly spoken the day before he died in 1951) “I don’t deserve this thing that’s happened to me” was valid.

Shoeless: The Life and... Fleitz, David L. Best Price: $2.99 Buy New $25.00 (as of 06:30 UTC - Details) Gropman is also completely unskeptical of the legend of Jackson’s fabled bat, “his talisman,”: Black Betsy. The bat, presumably the Southern boy’s most prized tool, was a gift to Joe when he was fifteen or sixteen from a Charley Ferguson, “the local batmaker” who “selected his best billet of seasoned lumber…a long four-by-four which he had cut from the north side of a hickory tree a year or so before.” After “clamping it in a lathe and fashioning the pale white wood into a bat, Charley rubbed it in a coat or two of tobacco juice because he knew Joe favored black bats.” Throughout his playing days, fans would yell, “Give ’em Black Betsy, Joe!” and Jackson would respond with the line drives his fans called “blue darters.” Stories surfaced, if not during Jackson’s playing days at least later, that Joe reportedly took his bat to bed with him every night, as well as down South each winter because he believed she preferred the warmth. Jackson, when he was in his early fifties, presumably gave the bat to the mayor of Greenville, South Carolina (where he had grown up and where he lived most of his life). The bat, thus according to legend, went unbroken through countless Mill League, minor league, and exhibition games. The “Black Betsy” story was recast by Bernard Malamud in his 1952 novel The Natural as the main character Roy Hobbs (a composite of Joe Jackson, Babe Ruth, and Eddie Waitkus) travels with his bat “Wonderboy” fashioned from a tree struck by lightning. To my knowledge and that of Baseball Digest, whom I contacted, those are the only two recorded instances of a baseball bat receiving a “Christian” name.

Other aspects of Jackson’s youth and life are less fanciful. His tenant farmer father and his three brothers all worked in a Brandon Mill, South Carolina, sawmill until the father moved to Pelzer, south of Greenville where he found a job in the engine room of a new cotton mill. Jackson himself began working seventy-hour weeks in the mills at age six. Educational opportunities were non-existent. The mill owners sponsored baseball teams to create a “sense of community” -actually to provide local entertainment to appease employees and to discourage them from moving their families from the shanties they rented and away from the Company Store.

Jackson’s abnormally long arms, huge hands, and natural playing ability (he could hit, run, field and throw) made him a star on the mill teams, and supposedly his brothers “passed the hat” into which spectators threw coins whenever Joe got a timely hit or made a stellar catch or throw. (Jackson did some pitching, but, after one of his deliveries struck a batter breaking his arm, he converted to outfielder). The Greenville News in 1900 commented favorably on the fact that “goodly sums of money” were being bet on the games, interpreting this as proof of baseball’s growing popularity.

According to Gropman, Jackson acquired the “Shoeless Joe” nickname around 1908. It was not a case of a country boy unused to shoes preferring to play in his bare feet. Supposedly
Jackson, attempting to break in a new pair of spikes, the next day experienced painful blisters which would not permit him to wear footwear. In the scheduled game against an Anderson, South Carolina, mill team, Jackson played in his stocking feet and homered, and, as he rounded third, a fan shouted, “Oh, you shoeless sonofabitch!” The baseball writer for the Greenville News, Scoop Latimer, coined “Shoeless Joe Jackson” in his column the next day much to his readers’ delight.

Jackson’s major league playing time extended from 1908-1920 although the equivalent of full seasons in the majors spanned only 8.2 years, not thirteen as has often been given. He was purchased by Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, had difficulty adjusting to the northern city and his teammates, and spent one season with Savannah in the Sally League and another with the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern League. (Jackson felt comfortable and found his teammates more hospitable and less given to pranks in the southern cities). In 1910, Connie Mack traded the talented but unpredictable Jackson (in 1908 he left the parent club to return to Greenville) to the Cleveland Indians, and in 1915 he was traded by Cleveland to the Chicago White Sox. His .356 lifetime batting average is the third highest in major league history behind Ty Cobb (who consistently bested Jackson in the batting races) and Rogers Hornsby and currently still ahead of Wade Boggs. A rather suspect story claims that Babe Ruth copied Jackson’s swing because it was the smoothest he ever observed, while Ty Cobb is on record as describing Jackson as “the best natural hitter he ever saw.” Shoeless Joe Kinsella, W. P. Best Price: $1.04 Buy New $3.80 (as of 06:30 UTC - Details)

In Chicago, Jackson played for owner Charlie Comiskey, who savored the power of “indentured servitude”- baseball’s  reserve clause binding players to the team that held their contracts (prior to Curt Flood’s legal case a half-century later). Comiskey was steadfast in his view players should not be overpaid. Jackson’s highest salary with the White Sox was $6,000 in 1919. Characteristic of Comiskey’s tight-fisted strategies (except in the case of the college-educated second baseman Eddie Collins who earned $10,000 in 1919) was his handling of star pitcher Eddie Cicotte, master of the knuckler (involving specially-prepared imbalanced baseballs) and the now illegal shine ball (involving paraffin on the pant leg). Cicotte was promised a bonus if he won 30 games. When the pitcher reached 29 wins, he was removed from the rotation (the team had already clinched the pennant, and the argument given was that Cicotte needed to be rested for the World Series).

Comiskey’s role as a symbol of insensitive capitalism became pivotal for at least three contemporary writers; the historian of the 1919 Series Scandal Eliot Asinof in his 1962 investigative account Eight Men Out; the socially conscious author (Union Dues) and screenwriter-director (The Return of the Seacaucus Seven and Matewan) John Sayles, who scripted and directed the film version of Eight Men Out and who cast Asinof in a small role as president of the National League; and playwright Lawrence Kelly who wrote the 1976 off-Broadway drama Out For them, Shoeless Joe Jackson is forever a doomed innocent, mistreated and held in low regard by his employer, and susceptible to the money-making pleas of a few select teammates and the mushrooming complexity of a Watergate/Irangate-like conspiracy.

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