But then, at the height of his career, he was disgraced and thrown out of organized baseball for his alleged role in fixing the 1919 World Series. The “Black Sox Scandal,” as it has come to be called, involved eight members of the Chicago White Sox who were indicted for throwing the Series to the Cincinnati Reds.
The most famous phrase to emerge from the Black Sox scandal, and perhaps from all of baseball, was the tearful question allegedly put to Shoeless Joe by a young fan: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” But Joe did not say it wasn’t so. An illiterate country boy, he gave contradictory answers about his involvement in a gambling scheme. Although he denied that he threw any games, his major league career was over and he entered history as a personification of corruption.
That was over seventy years ago. Since then we have learnt much about Jackson’s real role in the Black Sox scandal. The facts, as they have now emerged, are as follows: Jackson was approached by a teammate and offered $10,000 to throw the World Series. He declined. A short time later the offer was renewed, this time for $20,000. Jackson refused again. This information is from Jackson’s own testimony before the Cook County Grand Jury, the very testimony that has, in garbled, twisted press accounts. Been used as proof of Jackson’s complicity. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that Jackson told one or more officials of the club before the Series began that a fix was in the making. He even asked to be benched for the Series to avoid any suspicion that he was involved, but his request was refused.
Several of Jackson’s teammates did conspire to throw the Series, and the White Sox lost to the Reds, five games to three. Jackson, however, playing under the watchful eyes of the club officials, was the star of the Series: he hit the only home run, fielded flawlessly, batted .375 to lead all players, and his twelve hits set a World Series record that stood for decades.
Like most of the known facts about the Jackson case, the event that is usually cited to prove his guilt has also been misrepresented. On the evening after the last game of the Series, one of Jackson’s teammates came to his hotel room and offered him an envelope containing cash. Jackson refused to accept it, an argument ensued, and Jackson stormed out of his own room. His teammate, pitcher Lefty Williams, threw the envelope down and left. This version of the crucial event in Jackson’s case was attested to, under oath, by the only two men who were there: Jackson and Williams. Their accounts agree. Jackson did not take the money, it was dumped on him.
Returning to his room, Jackson found the envelope and saw that it contained $5,000 in cash. He put it in his pocket. The next morning he went to Commiskey’s office at the ballpark, but was told Commiskey would not see him. He waited an hour, then he left.
Commiskey, who at that very moment was in a secret meeting with two of the fixed players hearing the story of the scheme, chose a hypocritical course of action. While publicly proclaiming his commitment to “clean baseball,” he privately spent the winter and almost all of the 1920 season denying the rumors that stubbornly clung to the 1919 Series and perpetrating a cover-up, in part to protect his valuable property, namely the guilty players. But in September of 1920, with reasons that had more to do with political in-fighting than with “clean baseball,” a grand jury was impanelled and the fix was exposed.
Now Commiskey’s priority was to protect his own reputation. His best option was to feed the suspected players to the grand jury, but only after they had been counselled by Commiskey’s own lawyer, Alfred Austrian. The point of this exercise seems to have been damage control – Commiskey would have looked bad if the public learned what he knew and when he knew it. Of the players fed to the grand jury, Jackson was the most problematic. He had been the only one to warn Commiskey before the Series began. If he told everything, Commiskey’s self-proclaimed integrity would be impugned and he would be revealed as a hypocrite and perhaps worse.
Jackson was working under two misconceptions when he met with Austrian: he believed the truth would protect him and he believed Austrian was his lawyer. Neither belief was true. Jackson began by protesting his innocence, but in a session that lasted for several hours, Austrian finally convinced Jackson that the truth would not be believed by the grand jury. We do not know exactly what Austrian suggested to Jackson (while Austrian admitted under oath that he had kept notes on his pre-testimony meetings with the other players, he claimed he kept no notes during his session with Jackson), but we can make some logical deductions by analyzing the grand jury testimony Jackson subsequently gave. A careful reading of that testimony reveals that Jackson told two diametrically opposed stories, one confessing his guilt and the other protesting his innocence. Logic leads us to believe the first story was probably Austrian’s, the second Jackson’s.
Suffice it to say that Jackson was eventually indicted, tried in criminal court, and found not Guilty. Nevertheless, he was banished from organized baseball. That is when his love the game led him to his second career in semi-pro “outlaw” ball.
In 1924, during a civil trial in which Jackson sued Commiskey for back wages on a three-year contract, the likely truth of how and why Jackson’s name had been falsely implicated in the Black Sox scheme finally came to light. Sleepy Bill Burns, the fixer who put the players and the gamblers in touch with each other, testified under oath that he had never talked to Jackson about the fix. Instead, he took the word of Lefty Williams, who claimed he was empowered to speak for Jackson. And Williams himself, also under oath, swore he never received Jackson’s permission to use his name with the fixers. This is perhaps the most compelling evidence we have, because it provides both motivation and means. The gamblers wanted a sure thing, and since Jackson was capable of going on a hitting streak that could carry the White Sox to victory despite the fix, they wanted Jackson in. So the fixed players, in the person of Williams, said he was. The means were equally simple: Williams and Burns both wanted the scheme to work, so one lied and the other took him at his word with no effort to substantiate his claim.
The outcome of the civil suit was ambiguous. The jury found in Jackson’s favor, but the judge overruled the verdict. Nevertheless, it was the second jury to hear Jackson’s story and find him innocent of culpable involvement in the Black Sox scandal. But the powers that be in organized baseball ignored the jury verdicts and refused to lift his life-time banishment.
Jackson received shoddy treatment, but this probably would not happen today. A modern-day Jackson would have his own lawyer from the very beginning. Nor would the shenanigans employed by Commiskey’s lawyer be tolerated by the bar today. Most important, an honest prosecutor today generally seeks to follow the criminal trail to the top of the mountain. Convicting the Watergate burglars was not enough. The special prosecutor followed the trail to the attorney general and eventually to the president.
But in post-World War I Chicago, corruption tainted more than the White Sox. The entire city – judiciary and all – reeked with influence-pedalling and power-brokering, and amongst the most influential brokers was Charles Commiskey.
It’s therefore no surprise that Commiskey now holds an honored place in the Baseball Hall Of Fame, while Shoeless Joe Jackson remains a scapegoat. Though both are now long dead, the true story deserves to be known. In the last years of his life, former baseball commissioner A.B. “Happy” Chandler got behind the efforts to clear Jackson’s name. “I never in my life believed him to be guilty of a single thing,” said the man who was privy to the secret files of the major leagues.
baseball is a game of legends. Memories play as important a role as current events. If it “ain’t so” – or even if it wasn’t as bad as legend has it – big-league baseball should be big enough to admit a mistake about Shoeless Joe. Like any other institution, baseball can only be honest in the present if it is honest with its own past. And since baseball is still viewed by many as a metaphor for America itself, such an act of corrective justice would have meaning beyond baseball as a mere game.
