JACKSON, JOE 1887-1951
Baseball player
Baseball's Tragic Hero
One of the greatest and most tragic figures in the history of baseball, Joe Jackson was one of the eight Chicago White Sox players banished for life from major league baseball for accepting money to throw the 1919 World Series. Of the players indicted in the Black Sox Scandal, as it came to be known, Jackson was indeed the most tragic. Even though he took $5,000 after the completion of the Series, he had played exceptionally well and maintained that he played to win during the entire championship. His tragedy seems all the greater because of his rise from impoverished beginnings in the rural South and his status as one of the greatest ever to play the game. As a hitter Jackson was surpassed perhaps only by Babe Ruth, who adopted Jackson's batting stance and swing. Asked why he fashioned his style after Jackson, Babe remarked, "Why not? Joe had the most perfect swing I ever saw." No less a judge than Ty Cobb maintained that Jackson was the best outfielder in the game.
Mill Boy
Joseph Jefferson Jackson was born on a rundown plantation in Pickens County, South Carolina, where his father, George Jackson, worked as a sharecropper. When Joe turned six years old, his father moved the family to Brandon Mill, a cotton mill town run by northern industrialists in search of cheap southern labor. The entire Jackson family, Joe, his father, six brothers, and two sisters, worked in the Brandon Cotton Mill. The mill was a dangerous place to work. Joe's brother Davey was caught in the mill machinery and maimed for life. The Jacksons, like other mill town families, earned such small paychecks that they were persistently in debt to the company for rent, groceries, and clothes. The mill, however, did organize a baseball team, giving its players less hazardous jobs and time off to practice each day. Moreover, the baseball team was paid to play games against other mill town teams. For Jackson the baseball team would open his way to an easier life in the mill and eventually a way out of poverty.
From the Mill to the Majors
The thirteen-year-old Jackson joined the Brandon Mill baseball team in 1901. He began as a catcher on the team but was soon moved to pitcher because of his strong throwing arm. Jackson pitched so hard that he broke a catcher's arm, after which he moved to the outfield. In 1907 he joined a semipro team in nearby Greenville, South Carolina. Jackson's play for the semipro team caught the eye of Tom Stouch, a former major league second baseman, who was the manager of the Greenville team in the recently organized Carolina Association. Stouch did not think much of Jackson until he saw him swing the bat. "He didn't appear to have much in him, but he drove the ball…like a bullet out of a gun," Stouch recalled. "I thought to myself, if this rube hits 'em like that every time, he must be some whale." Stouch signed Jackson to a seventy-five-dollar-a-month contract, nearly twice his pay at the mill. In 1908, after batting. 346 for Greenville, Jackson caught the attention of Connie Mack, the manager of the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League, who bought the southern ace for $900. Jackson, who had never been away from his family, had reservations about going to Philadelphia, and remarked to Stouch, "I hardly know as how I'd like it in those big Northern cities." Jackson failed to play well in Philadelphia, in part because the fans taunted him for his unsophistication. Mack tried to
provide him with instruction in reading and writing, but Jackson, out of embarrassment, would not cooperate. After the 1909 season, Mack released Jackson to play with a minor league club in Savannah, Georgia, in the South Atlantic League. In Savannah, Jackson met and married Katherine Wynn, who remained his wife until his death forty-two years later. At home in the South, Jackson batted. 358 for Savannah.
A Star in Cleveland
In 1910 Mack sent Jackson to play for New Orleans in the Southern League. Jackson led the Southern League in batting, with an. 354 average. In the meantime, Mack concluded that Jackson was not meant to play in Philadelphia, so he sold Jackson to the Cleveland Indians. Jackson blossomed in Cleveland, batting .387 for the last twenty games of the 1910 season. From 1911 to 1915 Jackson competed with Ty Cobb of the Detroit Tigers for the American League batting title. In 1911 he batted .408 while Cobb batted .420, giving Jackson the distinction of being the only American Leaguer to hit more than .400 and not win the batting title. Despite his success on the baseball field, his illiteracy continued to complicate his life. Hugh Fullerton, the most influential baseball critic of the decade, wrote that Jackson was a poor example for American youth, asking "why should they study when Joe Jackson showed them it was possible to be a star even when you could not read your own press clippings."
On to Chicago
In 1915 Cleveland sold Jackson to the Chicago White Sox for $65,000. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey's purchase of Jackson was one of many deals made by Comiskey to construct a club capable of winning the World Series. In 1916 Jackson almost singlehandedly carried the White Sox to the American League pennant by batting .341 and scoring ninety-one runs. On the strength of the pitching of Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, Chicago in 1917 won the American League pennant with one hundred victories. No Chicago team has won as many games since. In the 1917 World Series, the White Sox rolled over the New York Giants four games to two. Jackson hit .307 and made several game-winning catches in the championships. Chicago was on the verge of building a dynasty when World War I intervened. Several of Chicago's key players left the team to serve in defense industry jobs or the armed forces overseas in 1918.
The Black Sox
After World War I the White Sox regained the strength that propelled them to victory in the 1917 World Series. They appeared to be a likely candidate to win another world championship, although their National League opponents, the Cincinnati Reds, had a better regular season record, with ninety-six wins and forty-four losses. In the World Series, however, the White Sox never seemed to get the right playing combination together and lost five games to three. In 1920, it was revealed that eight players were guilty of deliberately losing the World Series in return for payoffs by gamblers v/ho had bet on the outcome.
Jackson's Role
What was Joe Jackson's role in the 1919 World Series debacle? According to Eliot Asinof, author of Eight Men Out, Jackson was involved in the scheme from the beginning, but at the last minute changed his mind and tried to inform Comiskey of the plot. Sadly, Jackson never managed to schedule a hearing with the team owner. Others maintain that Jackson became part of the plot through his association with Claude "Lefty" Williams, and that the $5,000 that Jackson received was half of Williams's payoff to his roommate, who half-heartedly went along with the plan. Some argue that the real culprit in the affair was Comiskey himself, who left his players vulnerable to gamblers' bribes by paying them such low salaries.
Later Life
In 1921 Jackson and the seven other Black Sox were banned from major league baseball by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the newly appointed commissioner, Although Jackson tried to stay in baseball by playing in the minor leagues under assumed names, he eventually retired from the game and returned to Savannah, Georgia, his wife's hometown, where he opened a successful dry-cleaning business. In 1951, several weeks before he was to appear on national television to plead his innocence once again, he died of a heart attack.
Sources:
Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out (New York: Ace, 1963);
Jack Kavanagh, Shoeless Joe Jackson (New York: Chelsea, 1995),
