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Why Shoeless Joe Jackson is Bustless Joe Jackson
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Twitter: AJMckenzie94847
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00:22Hi everybody, I'm Brian Kenney, and welcome to ESPN Classics' Top 5 Reasons You Can't
00:27Blame, a series that takes a fresh look at sports personalities who are remembered largely
00:31for their mistakes, controversial moments, or questionable decisions. Our mission is
00:36not to further vilify these individuals, but instead to challenge conventional wisdom
00:40and re-examine what has been accepted as fact. You'll see new evidence and hear new testimony.
00:45Time to open your mind and hear all the nuances of the actual story, not the shorthand version
00:50that often resonates through history. In this show, we'll examine one of the most scandalous
00:54events in the history of modern sport. We'll count down the reasons why you can't blame
00:58the 1919 White Sox for throwing the World Series. The Black Sox scandal resulted in the banishment
01:04of eight Chicago players, including shoeless Joe Jackson, the man with the third highest
01:08career batting average of all time. The effect of the Black Sox scandal is still being felt
01:13today, as we debate the Pete Rose case, or any other case in any sport involving betting.
01:18Before we defend the Black Sox, let's take a look at the evidence against them.
01:26When the World Series was ready to occur, people really expected the Chicago White Sox to beat
01:31the Cincinnati Reds. They were a clear favorite.
01:34The fact is, they had won the pennant in the World Series in 1917, just two years prior.
01:41Ty Cobb once told me that shoeless Joe Jackson was the finest pure hitter he'd ever seen in his life.
01:48For a World Series, you need pitching. And they had pitching. Eddie Seacott and Lefty Williams were both 20-game
01:55winners.
01:56Yet as game one of the best of nine approached, the odds began to shift in favor of the Reds.
02:02Suspicions of a fix were in the air.
02:05Those kind of rumors happened every October.
02:07What was different about October of 1919 was that the betting went in that direction, too.
02:15That a lot of smart money, big money, was going down on the Reds.
02:19The results of games one and two, which were played in Cincinnati, gave weight to the rumors.
02:25Seacott got knocked out. Nine to one. Reds in the first game. The second game, a very close game.
02:30I'm surprised they had eight games back then. I can't have an even number of games.
02:37Lefty Williams loses a four to two.
02:40The third game, the White Sox won. Then the pattern repeated itself, where the first two pitchers, Lefty Williams and
02:47Eddie Seacott, who normally won, lost their two games.
02:51The White Sox, down four games to one, were on the brink of losing the best of nine series.
02:56But poor pitching from their aces was not the only reason.
03:00Their main RBI man, shoeless Joe Jackson, whose 96 were third in the majors during the regular season, was not
03:08productive in the clutch.
03:10In the first five games, he came to bat with ten runners on base.
03:16Total of ten in the first five games.
03:19Six of whom were in scoring position.
03:21And he never drove in a run.
03:24He hit the only home run of the series when they were already behind in the last game, five to
03:29nothing.
03:30It seemed like Joe did most of his damage with the bat when the games were already out of hand.
03:36Cincinnati won the series in eight games, with its five victories coming when either Seacott or Williams started for Chicago.
03:44Winning bettors were paid off.
03:46White Sox fans grumbled.
03:48And baseball's grand old music played on.
03:51Then, in September of 1920, a Chicago grand jury, convened to consider the evidence on an unrelated charge, learned of
04:00possible improprieties with the previous year's World Series.
04:04When the grand jury proceeded for a while, lo and behold, they started opening this can of worms of what
04:11had transpired in the fall of 1919.
04:15They began to call people in.
04:16They put the fear of the Lord into Seacott, into Lefty Williams, and finally into Jackson.
04:22The prosecutor asked if he had agreed to throw the World Series for $20,000, and Joe said, yes, he
04:29did.
04:30And the prosecutor said, did you accept $5,000?
04:33And Joe said, yes, he did.
04:35In January of 1921, the owners named Kennesaw Mountain Landis, a hardline federal judge, baseball's first commissioner.
04:44Two months later, he suspended Jackson, Seacott, Williams, and five other alleged co-conspirators.
04:51Among the infamous Chicago 8 was first baseman Chick Gandall, who told Sports Illustrated in 1956 of his connection to
05:00Boston gambler, Sports Sullivan.
05:02He was the person that apparently was first contacted by Chick Gandall in 1919.
05:09Gandall told Sullivan, the players are ready to throw the series and need money.
05:14There were eight men on the team that were going to make sure that the Chicago White Sox, heavily favored,
05:19didn't win the World Series.
05:20They all knew what they were doing.
05:22People say, well, gee, Joe Jackson was illiterate.
05:25He can't read and he can't write.
05:27Well, he knew how to count.
05:29Eddie Collins, who was the White Sox's second baseman, later said he had no pity for these players who were
05:35evicted.
05:36He said they knew what they were doing.
05:38There were no excuses because they took a crooked course.
05:43There's no question that the players were guilty.
05:47What Landis did was make it very clear that throwing games was a capital crime of baseball.
05:53The way he did that was the eight players who were involved, he banned for life.
06:02While 1919 is often described as the springboard to a golden age of high living and larger-than-life personalities,
06:08the decade leading up to it was one of hard times for the working man, including those who toiled in
06:13the major leagues.
06:14The realities of the time helped frame why you can't blame the Black Sox for throwing the 1919 World Series.
06:20Here are some reasons that did not make our top five.
06:23We call them the best of the rest.
06:26Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm.
06:28By provoking President Woodrow Wilson to enter World War I, the Kaiser threw baseball, not to mention the rest of
06:35America, into a state of anxiety.
06:38While many major league players were in uniform, shouldering rifles instead of bats, the summer game slumped at the gate.
06:45The first contingent of American troops to come back came back in December of 1918.
06:52Nobody knew how fast the troops were going to come home.
06:56They knew the 1919 season would be played.
06:59They didn't know.
06:59Would the fans come back or not?
07:02Everybody's salary was kind of depressed in 1919 because of the previous season.
07:06Salaries were somewhat frozen going into 1919, so nobody was getting very much.
07:11What resulted was that it was a banner year for baseball.
07:15If they had realized that that was the case, then they probably would not have been as hardball in their
07:21dealings with salaries at the beginning of 1919.
07:24And if that had been the case, maybe the Eddie Seacots of the world might not have been as tempted.
07:30Another best of the rest, Guglielmo Marconi.
07:34Some believe that the Black Sox scandal would never have occurred if the inventor of the radio had allowed a
07:39communications company, later known as NBC, to connect his talking boxes via a network of commercial stations.
07:47Marconi thought that the idea of commercial radio broadcasts were simply not important enough or viable.
07:56In 1921, the very first national broadcast was transmitted.
08:01The effect of radio on baseball was immediate and dramatic.
08:05Salaries went sky high.
08:07I think the technology was there so that this could have happened four, five, six, seven years earlier.
08:12If radio had come along a decade earlier, they would have been playing for bigger states.
08:19And that scandal probably wouldn't have been possible.
08:26Reason number five, rampant corruption.
08:29Bribery was not limited to the inner workings of municipal governments, political elections, and police departments.
08:37The Chicago in which the White Sox were operating was one of rampant corruption.
08:44There's almost a wild west feel to some neighborhoods.
08:47This is the Chicago where people who have been deceased are frequently voting and voting often.
08:52Betting on baseball was so common that players and gamblers often mixed like peanuts and Cracker Jacks.
08:58Moreover, both breeds commonly emanated from the same socioeconomic substrata.
09:04The ballplayers came out of this world in many ways.
09:08They came from poor backgrounds.
09:11When they got to cities like Chicago, they hung out with gamblers, with prostitutes.
09:17Al Capone furnished limousines with bulletproof windows on it to haul the White Sox to the ballpark.
09:25So, yeah, they were pretty much intermingled.
09:28Gambling was present at baseball matches from the very first paid attendance match, 1858.
09:34The original owners of the New York Yankees were Big Bill Devery, who perhaps was the most corrupt policeman in
09:41New York City history,
09:43and a fellow named Frank Farrell, who operated a major gambling casino in New York City and 250 pool halls.
09:50Hal Chase was a great ball player.
09:54He was, on a number of occasions, accused of gambling.
09:58There was constant gambling.
10:01The game was infested with gamblers.
10:03And the Black Sox scandal was merely the biggest example of mass gambling that there was.
10:09America wanted to believe it was just the fault of these eight evil individuals.
10:15They did not want to come to terms with the fact that baseball players existed in this very corrupt world,
10:23that there's perfectly logical social reasons why they did it, why they thought they could get away with it.
10:29So the idea that the snake invaded the garden with gambling coming to the formerly pure baseball is, of course,
10:38hardwashed.
10:40Did that reason grab you?
10:41If not, we've got four more to go.
10:43Here's reason number four.
10:45Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, had short arms and deep pockets.
10:51Nobody was getting very much.
10:52Yes, some of the players were definitely underpaid.
10:55Jackson was getting $6,000.
10:57Joe Jackson was constantly compared to Ty Cobb.
11:00Ty Cobb was making $20,000.
11:02Certainly any C-cut was underpaid for winning 29 games, getting, what, $6,000?
11:07Lefty Williams was probably the most underpaid.
11:10Here's a guy who had won 24 games.
11:12He was still getting just over minimum wage with, like, $2,400.
11:16Comiskey wasn't giving him any, and no other owner was either.
11:18No, I think Comiskey deserves blame, absolutely.
11:21He gave them the least amount of meal money when the team was on the road.
11:25I think the classic amount was $4 to $5 a day.
11:29He paid $3 a day.
11:31He was also very stingy about such things as laundering uniforms.
11:36And the team would get out there forced to pay their own laundry bills, which was absolutely unheard of in
11:41big league circles.
11:42Not only was Comiskey known as a cheapskate, he was an elitist.
11:47None of these players were very well educated.
11:49Happy Felsch had a sixth grade education.
11:52Shoeless Joe Jackson had no education at all.
11:55Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was one of the best players in the league at that time, was making $6,000
11:59a year.
12:00However, Eddie Collins, who was the second baseman and captain of that team, was making $15,000 a year.
12:07Eddie Collins was a college graduate, and the other players resented him both for his education and for his high
12:14salary.
12:15They're looking for some way to supplement their salary.
12:19And you couldn't blame some of the White Sox for trying to pick up a little loose change here and
12:25there.
12:25Who was most responsible for these guys selling out Comiskey and squeezing those players and making them easy prey for
12:33gamblers?
12:35Lack of a whistleblower.
12:38Although rumors flew that something was rotten on the White Sox before and during the 1919 World Series, newspapers didn't
12:46report anything specific.
12:48The suspicion among the writers, especially Hugh Fullerton and James Cousenberry, was that...
12:57The sports writer, Granlin Rice, was told by a friend of his that the series was fixed, and he didn't
12:57say anything to anybody.
12:57And during the 1919 World Series, newspapers didn't report anything specific.
13:03The suspicion among the writers, especially Hugh Fullerton and James Cousenberry, was that there had been business being done, shall
13:12we say, by the White Sox players.
13:14The sports writer, Granlin Rice, was told by a friend of his that the series was fixed, and he didn't
13:21say anything to anybody.
13:23The rumors reached some of the most powerful men in baseball.
13:27Among them, American League President Van Johnson, White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, and Cubs former owner Charles Wiegman.
13:36Wiegman said that he had heard from Monty Tennis, who was a big gambler in Chicago, that the fix was
13:42already on.
13:42He didn't think to tell anybody. Charles Wiegman just didn't think it could happen.
13:47Because a baseball game was hard to fix, let alone a World Series.
13:50I'm sure Comiskey knew. If Charles Wiegman knew, Comiskey knew.
13:55Charlie called it while the series was still on. He warned Ben Johnson, the league president.
14:02He said, there's something wrong going on here. He ignored him.
14:06The only publication that vigorously pursued the Black Sox story was one meant to serve the gambling industry.
14:13They tried to bring this to baseball's attention, and baseball really didn't want to hear about it.
14:18That's the way baseball was in those days. Nobody wanted to know the truth.
14:23Because they were afraid of creating any suspicion that people would lose respect for the game.
14:29Anybody could have called for a full investigation. Nobody did that.
14:33Before we get to reason number two.
14:39Say it ain't so, Joe. Say it ain't so.
14:44Long dismissed as apocryphal is the legend of the broken-hearted boy yelling those words as his hero, Joe Jackson,
14:51left the grand jury courtroom.
14:53But Roland Geary, who died in 1989, breathed a bit of life into one of the most touching stories in
15:01baseball's folklore.
15:03Say it ain't so, Joe. That appeared in a newspaper.
15:06And yet no one believes that Joe Jackson ever heard a little kid say those words.
15:10It's possible that he never heard it at all.
15:13But the question for me is, did Roland Geary say it?
15:18My husband, Roland Geary, was a nine-year-old boy that was taken to the hearing of Julius Joe Jackson.
15:25And he's the one that said, say it ain't so, Joe.
15:28He didn't want his hero to be guilty of any wrongdoing.
15:33But with no photograph or voice tape of the incident, the story, however true it may be, remains beyond the
15:40reach of proof.
15:41From all indications, it was fiction made up by Charlie Owen and the Chicago Daily News.
15:47I got footage of Joe Jackson coming out of the courtroom and then down and out onto the street, and
15:53I don't see any kids there.
15:54The views that the baseball purists like to take, that this event never really happened.
16:01All I know is, my father said, it did happen.
16:07That brings us to reason number two.
16:10The game stats are inconclusive.
16:13You can't judge anything about fixed games by observing the actions of the players.
16:21That's the whole nature of fixed games.
16:24Joe Jackson batted 375.
16:27That's the highest out of anybody on either side.
16:29He hit the only home run on either side.
16:31He fielded 30 balls, made no errors.
16:35When you look at Eddie Collins, who's the hero of the White Sox, he batted 226 and had two errors.
16:40Now, how do you say Jackson's the one that blew it where Eddie Collins was in there doing everything he
16:44could?
16:45Although Jackson admitted he had accepted $5,000 to conspire against his own team in the 1919 World Series,
16:53he also suggested in his grand jury testimony that he did not deliver on his promise to the gamblers.
16:59On page 11 of the confession, when they asked Joe, did he play to win?
17:03Did he hit to win? Did he run the bases to win?
17:06Yes, I did all those things. I played to win.
17:09That wasn't in the newspaper.
17:10The fact that he confessed that he took $5,000, that made headlines.
17:15But not that he played to win.
17:18Another factor that may have influenced the outcome of the 1919 World Series
17:22was the possibility that Eddie Seacott, who notched only three of his 29 victories in the final month of his
17:28season,
17:29was arm-weary.
17:30Coming down the stretch, Seacott started to wane in September.
17:35In fact, the last three starts of Seacott, he had been hit hard.
17:41Even the press was starting to question the condition of Seacott's arm.
17:46There was a rumor before the series that he had developed arm problems.
17:51Eddie Seacott wasn't himself. He wasn't able to pitch like a 29-game winner.
17:57They were acquitted. The seven Chicago players who stood trial were found not guilty of defrauding Charles Comiskey and the
18:05public.
18:06There were no sports bribery statutes in the state of Illinois.
18:11And so they could not be convicted for throwing a baseball game.
18:15They weren't charged with throwing ball games. They were charged with a fraud against Charles Comiskey's business.
18:21They were acquitted in a court of law from being guilty of conspiracy to defraud the public, a very vague
18:29and nebulous charge.
18:31The weight of the prosecution's case was lightened considerably when, at the trial, the defendants declined to testify.
18:38Because it was a criminal trial and because of the Fifth Amendment, no one ever really heard under oath what
18:45Seacott, Williams, and Jackson actually did or did not do during the eight games of the nine-game World Series.
18:54Nothing could be proven. You needed evidence. And what evidence did they have? They had lots of rumors, but how
19:00could they prove it?
19:01On August 2nd, 1921, after just two hours and 47 minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted the players.
19:10We had this marvelous celebration. The jurors hoisted the ballplayers on them, carried them out in triumphant, reading in the
19:19courtroom a stampede of joy.
19:21But the next day, the players felt the heavy hand of Kennesaw Landis. The commissioner banned for life the seven
19:28defendants and one other player suspected of being involved in a fix that may not have been carried out.
19:35He never really did an investigation. He just waited until the trial was over and then suspended them for life.
19:41Jackson felt that he had been exonerated by the court and that Judge Landis had exceeded his authority.
19:48I would imagine my dad was, you know, totally shocked because if I was vindicated in a court of law,
19:54I would think that it's over.
19:56They paid the price for all the problems that baseball was having with gambling.
20:01History blames the players, but I don't think it's fair to blame the players unless you've got them some evidence
20:08in court against them, which you don't. They were acquitted in court.
20:14History has been harsh toward the Black Sox.
20:16While the players were considered outlaws with some playing in semi-pro leagues, Joe Jackson was used decades later to
20:22romanticize the redemption of a father-son relationship in the novel that spawned the movie Field of Dreams.
20:28Even aficionados of the sport are split on how history should judge these men.
20:32Hopefully we've given you something to think about.
20:34I'm Brian Kenney. Thanks for joining us.
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