Rob Manfred May Have Just Opened A Window for Joe Jackson to Get Into Cooperstown. It Needs To Be Slammed Shut Fast

 

Just a few hours ago Commissioner Rob Manfred officially  repealed Pete Rose’s lifetime ban on baseball, allowing him to be posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame should the Veteran’s Committee see fit.

There will no doubt be much debate about this decision over the weeks and months to come and at a certain point I will no doubt weigh on it. This article, however, is about what is surely going to be a footnote on everything involved Rose but that by doing so the Commissioner has made the greatest possible reason for the ban to be there in the first place.

Manfred announced that ‘permanent ineligibility ends on upon the passing of the disciplined individual’ and in his discussion he only mentions Rose. But as both ESPN and the Times reported this ruling also applied to the members of the so-called Black Sox and most significantly Shoeless Joe Jackson.

In an article I wrote just this past year I made it very clear that I believed that is due to films – particularly Field Of Dreams – have done much to whitewash Jackson’s legacy among a new generation of baseball fans who might only know the story of the Black Sox from Kevin Costner’s film. This was nothing new, there has always been a bandwagon for Jackson’s reinstatement while he was alive and even after Commissioner Landis barred him from the game, future commissioners always upheld it despite the pleas of Jackson’s contemporaries. Happy Chandler, Landis’ successor, upheld the ban while Jackson was still alive and despite the efforts of his defenders, all future commissioners continued to do so.

When Rose was banned from baseball by Bart Giamatti in 1989, this plus the release of Field Of Dreams did much to put Jackson’s eligibility back in the spotlight. Bill James, one of the great students of baseball and a man who was always sympathetic to Rose during his lifetime – he argued for decades the case against him was weak before Rose admitted guilt – made it very clear that there was a difference between what Rose did and what Jackson did. In his book on the Hall of Fame he wrote a chapter about everything Rose did and made an argument for his inclusion. There was one paragraph on Jackson: “I think the people who want Joe Jackson to be in the Hall of Fame are like the same kind of women who go to trials hoping to marry the cute murderer.”

This is a very cold and blunt way to talk about Shoeless Joe but it was consistent with James who said that if Jackson ever got into the Hall of Fame, everybody in baseball would have to hold their noses while doing so. As someone who is sympathetic to Jackson’s cause I’m very much inclined to hold with James’ argument.

For decades people have made the argument that given all the other issues baseball has had to deal with during the Steroid Era, baseball no longer has the high moral ground it did when Rose was banned. First of all, there’s a difference between using performance enhancing drugs and betting on games your team is playing: one is a violation and one is a crime. I’d further argue that rather than induct players who used steroids that people like Commissioner Selig – who turned a blind eye to what was going on during this period and did everything in his power to make sure the truth coming out – should be kicked out of the Hall of Fame. I would make a similar argument for any of the general managers or owners who have been inducted during this period who at the very least turned a blind eye or at worst covered up the crime to advance their bank accounts. They are, in my opinion, more guilty of crimes then the players are.

Rose later argued that sports betting has become a corporate sponsorship of baseball shows that they no longer have the moral high ground. This is essentially ‘the two wrongs make a right’ argument and makes it clear that all professional sports should stop sponsoring legalized gambling. It doesn’t de facto mean we should let Rose in.

But at least when it comes to Rose you can make arguments about him being denied due process before he was banned and there is the fact that betting on baseball, while morally ambiguous, doesn’t really hurt the game’s integrity that much. The same can’t be said for what Jackson, his teammates and all the players who Landis banned from baseball after the Black Sox scandal broke.

No one denies Jackson’s statistics should put him in the Hall of Fame. He batted .408 his rookie year, then followed it up with .393 and .375 averages. All of this was done in the deadball era: before he was banned during the 1920 season, he was averaging .382. His .356 lifetime average was the third highest of all time (ESPN lists its fourth for reasons I’m not clear on). He never led the league in batting because of his great rival Ty Cobb, who won the battle title nine times during the era Jackson was active. But Cobb himself thought Jackson was the greatest natural hitter he ever saw.

In his era power didn’t matter but he was one of the greatest hitters of triples during that period, leading the American league three times in that category. He managed 200 hits or more four times and led the American League with 197 in 1913. He hit 168 triples in his career. Of all the players who had their careers entirely after Jackson’s banned only Stan Musial hit more with 177 and Roberto Clemente is close to him with 166. Both had far longer careers than the nine and a half full seasons Jackson played.

Statistically Jackson belongs in the Hall of Fame I won’t say otherwise. None of this changes the fact that Jackson took money from gamblers with the intention of throwing the 1919 World Series and may very well have done so again during the 1920 season.

Jackson’s defenders will argue that he hit .375 during the series, hit the only home run and was charged with no errors. In their mind that means he played to win. My answer is: so what? He still took money with the intention of throwing the series.

And the reason we know this is that he confessed to a Chicago grand jury. Eliot Asinof has a complete transcript of this confession and the brunt of it is repeated for all to hear in Ken Burns’ Baseball. “They promised me twenty thousand dollars and paid me five.” His wife was there when he got the money and according to Jackson: ‘she said it was an awful thing to do.”

I don’t know why a hundred years after the fact we still think this is a morally gray area. The moment Jackson took the money from Lefty Williams he was an accomplice to the crime. Whatever renunciation he gave came years after the fact and is almost entirely from Jackson’s own lips. The argument seems to be that we should take the words of a man who took a bribe that he didn’t rig the World Series. The fact that Jackson lied about it for more than a year afterwards does nothing to make his halo shine brighter: it was only after the consequences of his actions became clear that he suddenly argued: “Yes, I took the money to fix the game, but I didn’t actually fix it.”

And the thing is, where as Rose never really had his day in court, the Black Sox technically had theirs. No one went to jail but being found not guilty doesn’t mean your innocent as we all know. Then, as now, the celebrity factor was apparent and it helped immensely that the grand jury testimony, including the confessions of Jackson and Eddie Cicotte ‘mysteriously vanished’ before the 1921 trial. This was, it’s worth remembering, Chicago during the roaring twenties which was notoriously corrupt even before Al Capone ended up there. It no doubt didn’t take much money to find a White Sox fan in the Chicago judicial system willing ‘to help our boys’. All eight White Sox were acquitted. And as I wrote in my article last year:

“And that’s why I think Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was named Commissioner of baseball even before the scandal broke, acted correctly when he banned the White Sox for life. He had every intention of doing so before the verdict which is why his famous statement began: “Regardless of the verdict of juries…”

…his decision to ban the Black Sox for life was absolutely the right call…. Imagine if they had been acquitted and allowed to return to play ball in the 1922 season… Imagine it, eight ballplayers known for being willing to sell out the national game just showing up to their old jobs as if nothing had happened.

…Landis really had no choice. These men had sold out the game. And we all know that just because you’re acquitted of a crime or scandal is no guarantee they won’t do it again.”

The decision by every commissioner that has followed Landis to make sure that Jackson never enters the Hall of Fame might seem unduly harsh as the era passed into distant memory and only the statistics and the images remain. But it was nevertheless the right one. No matter how extenuating the circumstances their defenders might want to make involving the stinginess of the owners and Comiskey in particular, no matter how much people may argue that Jackson was an illiterate who couldn’t possibly understand the consequences of his actions, it’s irrelevant when it comes to determining Jackson’s guilt. He took money to throw a game, the one sin that is absolutely irredeemable in the eyes of professional sports at all times in the game’s history. It’s a crime, it’s illegal and being banned from every aspect of the sport is the only fitting punishment.

By revoking this ban with Rose, Manfred has for all intents and purposes done the same thing for Jackson, the man who represents the biggest symbol of the worst aspects of the national pastime. Not Bonds, not McGwire, not Sosa or anyone from the steroids era, not even Rose himself.

Now I am aware that in a hyper-partisan era, morality and criminal behavior can increasingly be excused depending on your race, gender or political party. But I’d like to think even a century after the original crime was committed, we can still find agreement that if a man agrees to ‘play with the faith of fifty million people’ as F. Scott Fitzgerald once referred to another man key in the Black Sox scandal, should never be allowed to have a plaque anywhere near all of the men who did much to make baseball the great game it has always been. And considering that last year major league baseball did much to rectify its greatest original sin by allowing the statistics of Negro League players to count as part of the official major league record, the decision to allow for men like Jackson into the same Hall where so many of these men now have plaques seems at least three giant steps back for the game.

I truly think Manfred, who has already made some questionable decisions as Commissioner since he took office, has made by far his worst one with this blanket ruling. He would have done better to solely make it about Pete Rose alone and leave Jackson and the other ineligible players out of his statement altogether. There will no doubt be blowback about this statement in the days and weeks to come, but much of it will have to do with Rose.

My one comfort is that while he has lifted the ban of ineligibility he has left the responsibility to the voters and writers who make up the branch of Cooperstown. If there is one constant among them, particularly the Veterans Committee, it is that they have their own opinions of who belongs in the Hall of Fame and they have a memory that is frequently longer than that of any Commissioner. (It should be historically they tend to outlast most of them.) I suspect they have their own opinions about who belongs in and this statement will do very little to influence that.

Putting my faith in the same people who have inducted men like George Kelly, Rabbit Maranville and Rick Ferrell in Cooperstown is a thin branch to hang my hopes on. (Who are those players, you may ask? My point exactly.) But I’m clinging to it mainly because I’d like to think if nothing else, these writers have more of an institutional memory and a respect for the game then the average fan does. I don’t know what they’ll do for Pete  Rose yet. I hope they stand firm when it comes to Joe Jackson. They’ve stood on that line for nearly a century; I hope they keep standing on it.