The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [99]
The more interesting conspiracy to me concerns the lifetime ban of Shoeless Joe. Jackson was by far the best player on the White Sox. He admitted to knowing about the fix, and testified that he was against the plot, and wanted no part of it. Even when Joe threatened that he was going to go to Charles Comiskey with information, the other players said the fix would go down anyway. Ultimately, the uneducated Jackson took $5,000 to keep quiet. Who knows? He might have stayed quiet about the fix because he was afraid for his life. We’ll never know. There were so many contradictions. Joe didn’t know who to believe, or who to trust. At first, owner Comiskey pretended to protect his players, but later wanted nothing to do with them. Comiskey bullied Jackson into signing and confessing things. At first, Jackson voluntarily appeared before the grand jury and made a confession in which he named his co-conspirators. He later retracted his confession, which, as it happened, was among the documents later stolen from grand jury files. What a mess! Jackson certainly didn’t play like he was fixing on losing the World Series. He didn’t commit even one error, batted .375, and hit the only home run in the Series. He swore that he was not involved in any of the planning meetings, and was acquitted in a court of law.
When Joe Jackson died in 1951, the United Press obituary quoted Jackson as being bitter at Landis. “Landis said if the courts declared me not guilty, he’d stand by me. He didn’t keep his word.”
The proper definition of conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a wrongful act. In this case, the wrongful act is not exonerating one of the mythical figures in baseball history. Jackson truly was one of the greatest hitters of all time. Expelled from baseball at the age of thirty, his numbers would have exploded in the 1920s, as they did for almost all other batters. He paid a heavy price for little more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In my opinion, he paid too big a price. The punishment was not worthy of the crime. He lacked the savvy to deal with unsavory propositions, and allowed himself to trust the wrong authority figures. Two or three wrongs don’t make a right, but they do set a precedent. If there are members of Baseball’s Hall of Fame that conspired with gamblers to throw games from the same era as Jackson—and there are—then Jackson’s name should be cleared. This is not the same as keeping the lifetime ban on Pete Rose. Jackson was not a Major League manager, betting on his team to win (and not betting on his team on other days) while making personnel and pitching decisions. Rose, unlike Jackson, had excellent legal representation. Jackson’s options were limited. After trying to sue Landis for back pay in 1923—and convincing a jury he was owed money—a judge reversed the decision on the basis of contradictions. The judge ruled that Jackson had committed perjury, and ordered him jailed for a couple of days. After that, Jackson—not even allowed to play sandlot baseball or manage a Minor League team—never applied for reinstatement.
There is no denying that Joe Jackson knew about the fix. He was an obvious choice to be approached, and was told that it was going to happen with or without his help. He had $5,000 thrown at his feet—and reluctantly kept it. He knew too much, and was thrown, to employ a modern phrase, “under the bus,” paying an extremely heavy price. He was used by his fellow players, as a name to entice the gamblers. He was used by his owner. He was used by the new commissioner as a symbol for the cleansing of the game. For all we know, Joe could have “picked his spots” in fixing one or two of the games. Maybe he was more street-smart than modern historians give