Essays.

Say It Ain’t So Joe

The story goes that sometime in 1908, Shoeless Joe Jackson got his nickname after running around the bases in his socks. The reason – his new cleats were giving him blisters. Jackson came from a working class family in upstate South Carolina. At the age of nineteen, upon receiving an offer to join the Greenville Spinners – a Class D League baseball team – he exclaimed, “I’ll play my head off for seventy-five dollars a month.” Since the age of thirteen, he had worked in a textile mill alongside of his father, George, who maybe made five hundred dollars a year. Joe could not read. Signed the paper with a smile and a big ol’ X, I imagine.

What did George think of his son’s newfound success? Someone taught little Joe, with those long arms and legs of his, how to hit, throw, and catch. Picture the two under the South Carolina sun, the humidity soaking into skin. George takes off his shirt, his pale chest shining white, and rings out the sweat. Little Joe watches the trickle of moisture disappear into the red clay earth and follows suit, does the same.

“You gotta let go of the ball right in front of you,” George says, teaching his son how to throw. “That way it don’t fly up into the sky.”

*

1998. My father wakes me early in the morning. “Jared,” he says, in a quiet voice. “Time to get up.”

I follow him from my bedroom, with its bunk bed and bookshelf filled with Illustrated Classics and Legos, into the kitchen. At the table, a warm bowl of oatmeal and two pieces of buttered toast await me. I am not hungry. I am nervous.

“Are excited about today?” my dad asks.

I nod my head.

“You need to eat,” he says. So I do.

After breakfast, I put on my white baseball pants and black jersey – large enough, it almost reaches my knees. “Where’s your hat?” my dad asks. I run upstairs and find it buried under my pillow. Would’ve been embarrassing for any game, forgetting your ball cap, but especially on opening day.

With my mother and sister, we drive to Riverside Park. There are hundreds of boys and girls walking around, wearing the colors of different local businesses. Hodges Foundry. Pizza Joes. This year I’m playing for Veado’s, a mini market close to my grandmother’s house on the other side of town. The name is written in cursive, colored in Baltimore Orioles’ orange. I stand with my teammates, my one hand gloved, the other in my pocket, clutching onto my lucky Kenny Lofton baseball card. The other boys, all of them are talking, seem to know each other. My parents opted to send me to a private school, forty-five minutes away. “Until middle school,” they had explained. I feel shy.

The parade lasts three hours, the amount of time it takes for a small army of baseball players, ages six to thirteen, to walk from the park to main street and back. It’s cold out. April. Northwest PA. The year before it snowed. Should’ve worn long sleeves under the jersey. We pass the car dealership, the police department, library, the newspaper shop, First National Bank, and Fox’s Pizza. When I see my family – my sister perched up on my dad’s shoulders – I don’t wave back. Nervous my teammates might notice.

Reaching the park, an announcer yells out over the loudspeaker, “Welcome to a new season of Greenville Little League.” Later on, I’ll make it into the lineup in the last inning. I’ll strike out, and in the field, a ball won’t be hit my way. But it’s okay. I’m playing baseball. I had moved up divisions. Ten years old now. I know there’s much to learn. Still, while celebrating at Dairy Queen, I’ll sit there, eating ice cream, thinking about how my Kenny Lofton card isn’t as lucky as I thought.

*

In 1908, the first New Year’s ball drops in Time Square. The forty-sixth star is added to the American flag, representing Oklahoma. The Springfield Riot occurs, leading to the formation of the NAACP. Teddy Roosevelt designates The Grand Canyon as a National Monument. Marquis Mills Converse opens The Converse Rubber Shoe Factory. The United States elects William Howard Taft, weighing in at 354 pounds, as the 27th president. Harry Houdini publicly escapes from a padlocked milk can for the first time. Thomas Selfridge becomes the first person to die from an airplane crash. The life expectancy of a US adult reaches 51 years. The average salary is twenty-cents per hour. The Chicago cubs win the World Series in five games against the Detroit Tigers.

In game one, the Cubs score five in the ninth for the win. Game two, Joe Tinker hits the first World Series home run since 1903. Game four, Mordecai Brown throws a four hit shutout. Game five, the Tigers are again shutout, but to a crowd of only 6,200, after a scalping scandal leads to boycotts. Frank Chance, the Cubs manager and second basemen, finishes the Series eight for nineteen – with three walks, five steals, four runs, and two RBI’s – outperforming Ty Cobb as the Fall Classic’s most productive hitter.

Eleven years later, the team across town, the Chicago White Sox, will forever become remembered as the team who traded away the World Series.

*

1998 found the country mired in the Clinton investigation. Even at ten years old, I knew something was going on. Teachers acted strange if you walked up unexpectedly in the middle of recess, and my parents had begun to whisper to each other more than ever before. I was no longer allowed to read the front page news, only the sports and comics section, and the man who drove me to school – the father of a classmate –would switch off the talk radio show at certain points during the forty five minute commute, as if what was being said would singe my ears.

Still, I learned much in 1998. For instance, what it felt like to be a loser. As a nine year old, I rotated between first and third base, and my team tied another for first place. But a year later, my team finished 3-12, and I hardly played at all. The coach’s son, the same age and worse of a player, started every game in right field and kept playing until I was called upon as a replacement, usually in the next to last inning.

My father was never much of a sports enthusiast. Back then, he’d watch a game, play catch, or join me while I organized my card collection. He’d listen, as I’d explain to him what things like ERA meant or describe some story in my baseball history book – The Ultimate Baseball Book, an apt name for sure. On game day, he’d leave his carpenter job promptly at five thirty and arrive just before the first pitch. His only absence involved a forklift accident and two cracked ribs. I wasn’t old enough to appreciate, or even notice, how his interest was based on my interest. A soft spoken and dedicated family man, to this day, I can’t imagine my father ever taking part in anything even remotely competitive. Yet at the time, I wanted him to be different. To be a coach. I wanted to play. Ashamed as I am to admit it.

*

By the end of 1908 season, Shoeless Joe made it to the big leagues with the Philadelphia A’s. He didn’t play much, and in fact quit the team, returning to Greenville, SC and his newlywed fifteen-year-old bride, disgruntled by city life and the hazing about his illiteracy. Connie Mack, the owner of the A’s, in attempt to encourage Shoeless, even offered to pay for reading and writing lessons, but Joe refused.

Still, Joe returned to baseball the following spring, and three years later, during his first full season with the Cleveland Naps, he batted .408 – one of only twenty players to bat .400 in the now 150 years of Major League Baseball history. His contemporaries took notice. Baseball royalty, such as Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson, lauded his hitting ability. Johnson went so far as to describe Jackson as “…the greatest natural ballplayer I’ve ever seen.” A few years later, Babe Ruth paid Jackson the ultimate compliment, mimicking his batting stance.

Shoeless Joe became a fan favorite, adored for his idiosyncrasies, such as superstitiously keeping hair pins in his pocket while playing, naming his bat “Black Betsy,” and exercising his eye muscles by staring at the flame of a lit candle. Likewise, he quickly acclimated to city life and began to appreciate some of the finer things Cleveland had to offer, which ironically enough included fancy shoes. Joe even headlined a vaudeville performance in the winter of 1915.   

At the time, Cleveland was the fifth largest metropolis in the USA. But Shoeless Joe soon found himself on the move again, headed to an even larger setting – Chicago. The owner of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey, bought Jackson from Cleveland for $65,000. With inflation rates in mind, the modern equivalency of the transaction equals to just under $800,000. Yet Joe’s annual salary of $6,000 didn’t quite match the obvious value attributed to him.

Let’s compare his 1915 earnings with a few other cream of the crop players.  

-Ty Cobb:                   $20,000           Detroit Tigers

-Honus Wagner:     $10,000           Pittsburgh Pirates  

-Tris Speaker:           $18,000           Boston Red Sox         

-Walter Johnson:    $12,500           Washington Senators

-Eddie Collins:          $15,000           Chicago White Sox  

Joe was still one of the top twenty paid players in the league. However, it’s interesting to juxtapose his salary with that of Collins. In 1914 Eddie “Cocky” Collins deservedly won the MVP award – Jackson finished fifth. But with a salary more than double that of Jackson’s, one begins to wonder about the disparity. In fact, Collins’ contract too had been purchased by Comiskey, but for only $50,000. Obviously, more money could be allotted to Shoeless Joes’ buyout due to his lower salary, but perhaps Comiskey took advantage of a situation. The glaring difference between Collins and Jackson? Education. The former graduated from Columbia University, while Joe, again, could not read. By no means was Joe being robbed. But to have a member of your team, one considered your equal, making significantly more money, must have been a thought, which crossed Jackson’s mind.

*

With school over and the baseball season finished, my summer days were mostly spent at my grandmother’s across town while my parents worked. She lived in a single story ranch home, with a fireplace, wood paneled walls, and linoleum floors. Everything about it was small. The kitchen fit around three people, a disaster area I knew to avoid during holidays. In the only bathroom, when using the toilet, one’s shins came up against the bathtub. As a child, my mother had her own bedroom, but my three uncles all shared the other.

In stark contrast with the size of the home, my grandparents owned the surrounding forty acres, including a forest, pond, stream, and field. With every long and heavy rain, the stream would flood enough for us to canoe across the field, and during family gatherings, everyone would venture out into the front yard for a game of softball or volleyball. I preferred the pond, spent hours skimming rocks across the crusted scum green surface, attempting to catch frogs and tadpoles, using cattails as imaginary swords – King Arthur and The Three Musketeers had just entered my life. When in a destructive mood, I’d toss in the largest stone I could find, sometimes lugging one a half mile from the woods back to the pond, my tiny hands sore and cut up afterward. “Quit throwing rocks in my pond,” my grandmother would say. “Those fish deserve better.”

Before my grandmother married my grandfather, she wanted to go to college, study English, become a poet. But after my mother came along, my grandmother, not quite nineteen, gave up on those dreams. At times she claimed to have come from Irish immigrants, other times Welsh, and occasionally Scottish, but never British. Before naptime, she would read stories more suitable for my younger sister, such as the Berenstain Bears or Winnie the Pooh. Yet here and there, she would pull out E.E. Cummings or Maya Angelou, her two favorite poets. “I am a little church,” she would say. “No great cathedral.”

Up until 9/11, my parents refused to have cable in the house. But my grandmother did, though I don’t remember her watching much TV besides Oprah. For an hour and a half, we were allowed to watch shows like Looney Tunes or Tom & Jerry. After binging, we would wander outside, read, or mess around with whatever we could find in the house, which amounted to quite a lot. My grandfather was a truck driver, mostly absent, but my grandmother’s occupation as an antique dealer afforded a child with a wealth of curiosities and playthings. While she had a couple of showrooms in an antique mall, her leftover “stuff,” mostly from the 1920’s, filled my mother’s former bedroom and the other to capacity.

Items I remember:

-Dozens of empty perfume bottles

-Dresses of lace and sequins

-Jade necklaces, longer than my sister was tall

-Amber dishware, “King Cups,” I called them, perfect for Arthur

-Flapper hats & roller skates

-Jeweled rings, enough for each of my fingers ten times over

-So many different lamps  

During her buying trips, she would often bring back something little for the grandkids. After my mother dropped us off in the morning, I might find a kite, book, or action figure, waiting for me on her kitchen table. But the summer of 1998 was different. My gifts were solely baseball cards, after she noticed my fascination with the story gripping the baseball world – the 1998 home run race. Three players, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Ken Griffey Jr. were all vying for the single season home run record, sixty-one, set by Roger Maris thirty-seven years prior.

“Did you find anything good?” she would ask.

She had showed me how to look up the monetary value of my cards.

“That’s worth three hundred dollars?!” she exclaimed about a McGwire rookie card, which I found in a book of hundreds of cards she had bought for ten bucks.

“Well, a dealer won’t pay three, but you’d make at least one fifty.”

*

On April 6th, 1917, the United States officially declared war on Germany. Like the rest of the country, Major League Baseball did its part to help with the war effort.

Christy Matthewson – nicknamed “The Gentleman’s Hurler” and one of the first five players to be elected into baseball’s Hall of Fame – was said to have raised a hundred grand worth of war bonds in one day. Owners donated cash and gave away equipment to the government. Baseball had been promoted as a means of entertainment, a way of boosting the morale of the soldiers in Europe. In France, as many as two hundred ball games could take place on any given day. On the home front, professional players participated in military “drills,” while the minor league system dutifully shut down. However, as the war escalated, baseball found itself on the wrong side of stick, accused by the press and public of not doing enough.

Then, on the first of July in 1918, the “work or fight” mandate went into effect, in which every able body man, working a job considered inessential to the war effort, had to either switch to a more useful occupation, enlist, or be drafted. Some of these jobs included elevator operators and doormen, and by the beginning of August, the profession of baseball was declared superfluous by the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker.

By the end of World War I, over a third of all baseball players had enlisted in the military. The aforementioned Christy Matthewson, along with Ty Cobb, were members of the Chemical Warfare Service – their lead officer, Branch Rickey, would become general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and is perhaps best known for signing Jackie Robinson, dissolving Major League Baseball’s color barrier. Of all the ballplayers who fought overseas, eight major leaguers, twenty-seven minor leaguers, and three from the Negro League paid the ultimate price for their country. However, this number does not account for perhaps dozens more that perished from the lingering effects of war. Matthewson, for instance, passed away from tuberculosis in 1925. His lungs never fully recovered from a training exercise in which he was accidentally exposed to gas.

But Shoeless never made it to Europe. As the sole provider for his mother and wife, he was granted deferment by the draft board in Greenville, SC. A reasonable enough excuse. But Shoeless was making six thousand a year, not to mention his 1917 World Series winnings of $3,669.32 – much more than your average Joe – as the average salary of a USA household in 1918 was only $1,518. Most likely this is why the draft board changed their decision about Joe’s deferment status during the beginning of the 1918 season. Soon after, at his wife’s insistence, Shoeless found work at a Delaware shipyard – a job exempt from service – where he was hired as a painter.

He joined the shipyard’s baseball team and hit .393 in the Delaware River and Steel League. Words like “slacker” and “trench-dodger” were constantly yelled from the stands. And when two close White Sox teammates followed him to the shipyard, Comiskey went so far as to declare, “There is no room on my club for players who wish to evade the army draft by entering the employ of ship concerns!”

Comiskey’s threat, however, was unfounded. By the spring of 1919, less than half a year from the end of the war, Major League Baseball resumed, and the White Sox needed players. Comiskey offered Joe a one-year contract and, considering his soiled reputation, Shoeless accepted the contract, again for the same amount he had made each of the previous five seasons.

*

On September eighth, with almost a month left in the 1998 baseball season, Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris’ home run record. By the end of the season, he would hit seventy in total. Griffey Jr. trailed off in early August, and Sosa ultimately fell short by four.

I returned to school by the time Steve Traschel served McGwire the historical pitch. Neither my classmates, nor my fourth grade teacher, were particularly interested. McGwire’s sixty-second actually came during an afternoon game, just when school was letting out. I didn’t learn about it until the next day. The principal saw me in the hall and asked what I thought McGwire’s final number would be. I don’t remember my answer, but I do recall my disappointment, having failed to experience the moment in the moment.

In spite of the home run race being over, I followed the playoffs, sitting in my little bedroom desk, messing around with model airplanes, while listening through static interference to the play by play of lo-fi radio announcers. Considering my bedtime policy, I rarely made it through three innings, but something had shifted – my interest in the game, no longer just a backyard distraction. I even made my first bet that year. Told my dad if the Padres lost to the Yankees in the World Series, I’d do the dishes for a week, but if they won, he had to take out the trash for two. Banking on the elite pitching of Kevin Brown and Trevor Hoffman, over Derek Jeter and the Yanks, proved to be a poor decision. The Padres didn’t win a single game.

In ways only a ten year old could, I showed my support for the sport I had fallen in love with. I begged for McDonald’s. According to the commercials, “Big Mac” Mark McGwire loved the golden arches. And I convinced my parents to order me a subscription to Sports Illustrated for Kids, from which I used a poster of Alex Rodriguez for a science project, labeling the bones and muscles and organs of the ballplayer. My peers were obsessed with Pokémon cards, but I allocated the little money I had for the baseball variety instead. For Christmas that year, I unwrapped my first and only autographed baseball – the ’95 World Series Cleveland Indians, featuring Albert Belle and Manny Ramirez.

Most of all, I continued to read about the legends, the mythos of baseball providing over a century of tales, intriguing my boyhood imagination. Nineteen year old Mickey Mantle, giving way to a fly ball, allowing the soon to be hall of famer Joe Dimaggio to make the catch – the unselfish action resulting in an accident with a sprinkler and Mantle’s career long knee issue. Bill Buckner’s error. Jackie Robinson. Larry Doby. Kirk Gibson’s walk off. “The Catch.” The tragedy of Roberto Clemente – a fatal plane crash during a humanitarian trip to Nicaragua, only months after he reached 3,000 hits. Walter Johnson tossing a silver dollar across the Potomac, just like George Washington.

Ballplayers became my heroes, on the same level as D’Artagnan and King Arthur. And the sport, just as much, supplied the villains – John Rocker, Ty Cobb, and George Steinbrenner – a list which would soon grow exponentially.

*

A century has passed since 1919 World Series – between Shoeless Joe’s Chicago White Sox and the much inferior Cincinnati Reds – and “The Black Sox” scandal is still debated. Much has been written on the subject. I first read of the 1919 season in 1998, within the aforementioned The Ultimate Baseball Book, which for whatever reason hardly discusses the scandal.

“Others close to the scene, aware that the Sox’ stars were notoriously underpaid…quietly voiced alarm over some of the Series performances they had witnessed...The facts would not filter through all the ugly rumors until late in the 1920 season, when eight members of the Sox would stand accused of having fixed the Series and be barred for life.”

Shoeless is mentioned but once.  

“How, for example, could Joe Jackson, not noted for his guile, be a willing accomplice to the fix and still manage to be the Series’ top hitter?”

Here’s the story. Considering the favorable odds of a White Sox victory, a few players are approached by the mob, including the infamous Arnold Rothstein, to fix the World Series. They accept the deal, at least $5,000 each, on account of their low pay and the domineering Charles Comiskey. During the World Series, the fix is obvious. Cincinnati wins. A grand jury investigates. A trial ensues. One of the accused players, “Sleepy Bill” Burns, testifies, fully admitting to the conspiracy. Indictments are handed out. The trial finishes. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury unexpectedly rules not guilty.

Chicago Tribune described the scene as, “…a love feast.” But many were rightfully troubled by the verdict. The newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, former federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, disregarded the trial entirely and placed all eight of the accused on baseball’s “ineligible list,” meaning permanent suspension.

Of those suspended, Shoeless had the best case for his innocence. It was reported and corroborated that when approached about the fix, he turned down the money, twice. During the players’ meetings with the gamblers, he was not present. Jackson’s apparent confession involved the attorney of the Chicago White Sox, whiskey, and a document signed by an illiterate man. While some argue Jackson altered his performance based on whichever team was leading, he led all 1919 World Series players with a .375 batting average and committed no errors, even threw someone out at the plate.

Throughout the rest of his life, Jackson stuck to his story and continued to play and coach baseball, but never again in the Majors. In 1949, a few years before his death, Shoeless explained to the columnist Furman Bishop, “All the big sportswriters seemed to enjoy writing about me as an ignorant cotton-mill boy with nothing but lint where my brains ought to be. That was all right with me. I was able to fool a lot of pitchers and managers and club owners I wouldn’t have been able to fool if they’d thought I was smarter.”

*

It only took three years for McGwire’s record to be broken by Barry Bonds. In 2001, I was by no means disinterested – yet in the back of my thirteen year old mind, it seemed odd to me. Given my proximity to Pittsburgh, I was familiar with Bonds’ history as a Pirate in the early nineties. How had this lanky and speedy phenom turned into the most feared power hitter baseball had ever seen? I began to notice other things on the back of my baseball cards, other “oddities,” such as Brady Anderson and his out-of-nowhere fifty home run season. I learned the acronyms PED and HGH. Read up on anabolic steroids, using Encyclopedia Britannica on the new family computer. Heard a story about a group of high schoolers taking steroids.

Prior to the 2005 publishing of the Mitchell Report, my family and I moved from Greenville, PA down to South Carolina, just outside of Columbia. My hopeless, baseball aspirations promptly ended after ruining my finger during a freak accident, sliding into second base. My literary interests shifted. Camus replaced Dumas, and, while I still enjoyed Arthur, it was now T.H. White’s version. Enough information had already leaked that I had begun ignoring baseball, tired of questioning who was and who wasn’t using. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, yes, these were somewhat expected. But Andy Petite? Kevin Brown? Roger Clemens? Not just home run hitters. An admitted user, Ken Caminiti –the National League MVP in ’96 and member of the ’98 Padres teams – stated as many as half of all players were using, which was often the argument, the excuse given by the guilty player. If your friends jump off the bridge…

But some hadn’t. Cal Ripken. Ken Griffey. Randy Johnson. Mariano Rivera. Still, most of my heroes had died, killed off one by one. My adolescent worship, shown for what it was. And while I’ve since returned to baseball, love is now too strong a word.  

*

Early morning sunlight streams through the airport’s eight foot tall windows, gleaming off the white stone floor. My eyes follow the shadow of the frame, stretching from chair to wall, disappearing into the fringes of a fluorescent lit convenience store. I look up and see Alex Rodriguez, wearing all white, smiling poolside. “Alex in Wonderland,” the magazine cover reads. I wonder to myself if he ever feels regret. I remember reading how McGwire called up Roger Maris’ widow, told her why he had been wrong. How in 2009, Rodriguez apologized for his drug use. In an interview, he explained, “I want to do things to influence children…they should learn from my mistake,” only to then be caught again in 2013. He’s engaged to Jennifer Lopez now. A personality on Shark Tank. Runs A-Rod Corp, investing in things likes Snapchat, UFC fitness centers, and almost a billion dollars worth of real estate.

The summer day is hot, humid, something to be expected in South Carolina. I find the empty Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial Park behind a neighborhood, buried some five blocks back from the main road. The baseball field, maintained and clean, sits in front of the backdrop of an abandoned mill factory, three stories tall. Kudzu creeps up the brick walls and boarded up windows. Adjacent to the ball field is a smaller, modern factory. A single trail of white smoke rises against a clear blue sky. In the dugout, I watch as a couple of kids jump the outfield fence and make their way across the field, entering the playground. Next to a concession stand, a cracked plaque of worn out words tells the tale of Joseph Jefferson Wofford Jackson and a brief history of textile baseball. The kids leave the moment a lady appears walking her shih tzu.

Later, I wander the streets of Greenville, looking for the statue. Can’t find it. Rest on a bench for a few minutes in the shade of crepe myrtle, before I ask.

“Your phone’s wrong. Got moved to the stadium,” the man says. “But you’re not too far off.”

I keep walking. Passing shop, restaurant, and boutique. And there it is. A bronze plated Shoeless, post swing, watching an invisible baseball as it continues to climb. Just beneath the statue’s feet, an inscription reads, “No one noticed until he hit the ball and was rounding the bases in his stocking feet…during the series, Jackson played flawless baseball…though tried and found innocent, all eight players were banned from baseball for life.”

On the other side of the stadium, I find the museum – the home Shoeless moved into after receiving Landis’ verdict in 1920. Small. Single story. Made of brick. “Due to the amazing growth in Greenville, our museum will be moved one hundred yards to the south.”

Just my luck, I think.

A man and woman approach me.

“He’s the only reason we’re here,” she says. “We’ve been driving around everywhere, looking at history.”

The man asks me with a grin, “Do you think he did it?”

I laugh, “Does it matter?”

His grin leaves.

“Yes it does,” he says. “It sure does.”