Shoeless Joe: say It ain't so

You can't find the treasure hidden on the road until you start digging. Probably not what you thought, but something will pop up.

While searching yesterday for a sports bar in Greenville, SC that would simultaneously telecast both the Mizzou and Illini football games, we stumbled across the Shoeless Joe Jackson historical museum.

If there's a more tragic character than Shoeless Joe Jackson in the long and intricate history of baseball, I know not of him.

Jackson’s career ended in utter disgrace when he was barred from organized baseball because of his role in the Black Sox gambling scandal of 1919. He and seven of his Chicago White Sox teammates were allegedly paid to throw that fall’s World Series.

Many call him the greatest hitter who ever lived. His .354 career batting average is the fourth highest of all time, his playing days short circuited in his prime. Who knows how great his numbers might have been. Due to his lifetime ban Jackson has not been eligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The museum is located in the small house where in 1954 Jackson died. Two miles away is the Brandon Textile Mill where Jackson began laboring at age six. At 13, he became a regular on the mill’s baseball team. The factory building and the adjacent ball field still today stand, a large smokestack looming behind the first base line.

With the exception of 14 years spent playing professional baseball, Shoeless Joe Jackson spent his entire life in Greenville.

Due to no child labor laws of the day, there was no time for school, so Jackson never learned to read or write. He probably would have spent the rest of his life working in the textile mills if it weren’t for baseball.

.As for his role in the Black Sox scandal, it seems to have been peripheral at worst. History has recorded Jackson as a victim of circumstances he could neither control nor fully comprehend.

The prosecution of Shoeless Joe and his teammates was a complicated, ambiguous affair replete with coercion and distortion of half-truths. Jackson had a .375 batting average and no errors in the 1919 Series. His 12 hits set a Series record that stood until 1964, 13 years after he died.

In the 1990’s two movies, Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams; sparked a renewed interest in Jackson’s plight.

Years after he was banished Jackson still received sympathetic fan mail. His story has been handed down through generations. It locks in the tradition and nostalgia that is America’s game. In Field of Dreams, Jackson's "ghost'' takes to the ball field by sort of "floating'' from the corn stalks in the outfield.

As I gaze over the very outfield ground that over a century ago was patrolled by a young illiterate mill hand who was destined to become the infamous Shoeless Joe Jackson, I think, “say it ain’t so, Joe.”