The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [98]
Cicotte implicated the others. The wire stories reported on September 28, 1920, that “Joe Jackson visited the office of attorney Alfred Austrian, counsel for the White Sox, with manager Kid Gleason, shortly after Cicotte had appeared before the inquisitors. It was reported that Jackson was preparing a statement . . . similar to one that Cicotte made to the grand jury.” Historians have written that Jackson volunteered to tell what he knew. He told Austrian he was innocent, but was pressured to confess involvement or face greater danger from the grand jury and angry gamblers. Austrian “tricked” Jackson into signing a waiver of immunity. In 1989, Donald Gropman, Jackson’s biographer, told Mike Decourcy (of the Scripps Howard News Service), “It was incumbent on Austrian to destroy Jackson’s credibility. Comiskey was covering his behind.” (Comiskey couldn’t let on that Jackson had tried to come to him about the fix, and had tried to return the money.) Poor Jackson didn’t even have proper legal advice. Despite the fact that the White Sox players were acquitted, they were all barred from baseball for life by the new commissioner.
In 1924, Jackson sued Comiskey for back wages, and in that trial Joe asserted that he had refused to take money and had tried to tell Comiskey about the fix. Jackson didn’t make deliberate errors, or attempt to make outs while batting. His role—perhaps unwittingly—was merely having his name attached to the group of teammates who took money for throwing the World Series. This second jury cleared Jackson of his alleged role in the fix.
I understand why Kennesaw Mountain Landis had to come into office, and ban Shoeless Joe. But why didn’t he ever go back and clear his name, especially since he was cleared by a jury of his peers?
When Judge Landis banned Jackson, he wrote the following:
Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.... Of course, I don’t know that any of these men will apply for reinstatement, but if they do, the above are at least a few of the rules that will be enforced. Just keep in mind, regardless of the verdict of juries, baseball is entirely competent to protect itself against crooks, both inside and outside the game.
In the introduction to Donald Gropman’s 1979 book, Say It Ain’t So, Joe! The True Story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 World Series, Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote, “Former Baseball Commissioner A.B. Happy Chandler has gotten behind 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.”
And why hasn’t any commissioner since Landis lifted the lifetime ban? After Pete Rose was banned from baseball in 1989, the Baseball Hall of Fame ruled that any player banned from the game was ineligible for induction into the Hall. That rule, put in place to spare Major League Baseball the embarrassment of enshrining Rose, closed the door on any chance Jackson had to be inducted—long after his death—into the Hall of Fame.
Clearly there was a conspiracy to throw the 1919 World Series. It involved gamblers, star players for the White Sox, and others who knew too much. It was proven that conspirators in the “Black Sox” scandal took money to fix the Series. But while this conspiracy is well known and has been chronicled at