Shoeless Joe Jackson

• Born: July 16, 1888
• Birthplace: Pickens County, South Carolina
• Died: December 5, 1951
• Place of death: Greenville, South Carolina

Sport: Baseball

Early Life

Joseph Jefferson Wofford Jackson was born in poverty on July 16, 1888, in the small South Carolina town of Brandon Mills. His father was a mill worker and never received a decent salary. Joe Jackson’s education ended before his twelfth birthday, and he was illiterate when he began his major-league career with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1908. Joe had a harsh childhood. He had to start working in the mill with his father at the age of twelve in order to help his family financially. When he was not working, Joe played baseball. He owed his nickname, “Shoeless Joe,” to his curious practice of often playing baseball without shoes.

The Road to Excellence

Shoeless Joe had a relatively short and spectacularly successful career in the minor leagues. As an outfielder, he hit for a high average throughout his career in the minor and major leagues. Between 1908 and 1910, he won batting championships in three separate leagues. In 1908, he led the Carolina Association with a .346 average while playing for the Greenville, South Carolina, team. The next year, he advanced to the Savannah, Georgia, team in the South Atlantic League and hit .358. He followed this accomplishment by winning the 1910 batting title for the New Orleans team in the Southern Association with a .354 average. He played in ten games for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1908 and 1909, but the Philadelphia manager and owner Connie Mack traded him to the Cleveland Indians late in the 1910 season. Shortly after this trade, Shoeless Joe was called to the majors, where he would remain until the end of his career in 1920.

The Emerging Champion

Shoeless Joe was a powerful and effective hitter. His career batting average of .356 was surpassed only by Ty Cobb’s .367 career average and Rogers Hornsby’s .358 lifetime average. In 1911, his first full season with the Cleveland Indians, he hit .408, but he still lost the batting title to Ty Cobb, whose average was .420. Shoeless Joe never won a batting title in the majors because he had the misfortune of playing in the American League at the same time as such consistently great hitters as Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and George Sisler. Late in the 1915 season, he was traded to the Chicago White Sox. He helped his new team to win the World Series in 1917 and the American League pennant in 1919. Shoeless Joe seemed destined for a long and illustrious career in baseball. By his own choosing, this would not be the case.

Continuing the Story

As the 1919 World Series between the underdog Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox began, few would have believed that Shoeless Joe had conspired with seven other White Sox players to lose the series so that gamblers could win a huge amount of money. Unusually poor performances by key players convinced Charles Comiskey, then owner of the White Sox, that something dishonest had taken place, and he offered a reward of $10,000 for proof that a conspiracy had existed. Late in the 1920 season, Shoeless Joe and other players signed confessions, and they were then indicted for criminal conspiracy.

Before their trial, these confessions conveniently disappeared from the Chicago office of the Illinois State Attorney, and a jury found them innocent of all charges. In 1921, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the newly elected commissioner of baseball, ruled, however, that Shoeless Joe Jackson and his seven coconspirators had deliberately lost the 1919 World Series and would be banned from baseball for life. Shoeless Joe returned to South Carolina, where he became a businessman. He died of natural causes on December 5, 1951, in Greenville, South Carolina.

Baseball writers refer to this conspiracy as the Black Sox scandal because of the belief that these eight players dishonored baseball. Although defenders of Shoeless Joe have argued that the relatively low salaries paid to the White Sox players by Charles Comiskey should serve to diminish the players’ guilt, no baseball commissioner ever reversed this decision by Judge Landis, and no player banned from baseball has ever been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Summary

Although Shoeless Joe Jackson was a superb hitter, whose career batting average of .356 is the third highest attained in the history of baseball, he tarnished his reputation permanently by his participation in the conspiracy to fix the 1919 World Series.

Bibliography

Bell, John. Shoeless Summer: The Summer of 1923 When Shoeless Joe Jackson Played Baseball in Americus, Georgia. Carrollton, Ga.: Vabella, 2001.

Brody, Saul Nathaniel. “Shoeless Joe Jackson’s Bat and the Invention of Baseball History.” Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 11, no. 1 (2002): 89-96.

Burman, Howard. A Man Called Shoeless. Baltimore: Publish America, 2006.

Carney, Gene. Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006.

Fleitz, David L. Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001.

Gropman, Donald. Say It Ain’t So, Joe! The True Story of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Rev. ed. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol, 1999.

Nathan, Daniel A. Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Thompson, Joe. Growing Up with “Shoeless Joe”: The Greatest Natural Player in Baseball History. Greenville, S.C.: Burgess International, 1998.