Shoeless Joe

When the White Sox scandal sent baseball to the laundry twelve years ago Joe Jackson was among those players who failed to wash out clean. But, crooked or clean, experts still rate him the greatest hitter of any period of any league

By Grantland Rice

Who is the greatest natural batsman that ever played? I put this query in turn to Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Tris Speaker. There wasn’t a moment’s hesitation as each said – “Joe Jackson.” The fact that Joe Jackson was one of the Black Sox, banished from baseball after the world series scandal of 1919, had no bearing on the subject. Cobb, Ruth and Speaker were thinking in terms of batting art, not of sporting ethics. And when this trio call some ball player the greatest in his line, he must be just about that.

     The fourteen-year diamond career of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson is one of the greatest combinations of drama and tragedy that any sport has ever known. Back in the spring of 1907 a tall, gangling youth of twenty came from Brandon Mills, South Carolina, to play semi-pro ball at Greenville. He was unable to read or write. And he brought along the sobriquet of “Shoeless Joe” for the simple reason that he had played most of his early baseball in his bare feet. But he could hit like a champion from the first of his career.

     “I recall the first time I ever saw Joe Jackson,” an old-time player said recently. “We were playing some country team on a terrible ball field. The outfield was littered with rocks and broken glass. We had a tall, thin outfielder named Jackson I had never seen before. He had just dropped in a day or two before and we gave him a chance. You had to, after you saw him just once at the plate with a bat in his hands. He hit a triple the first time up and he made it look as easy as a Lajoie could. He was barefooted that day and along about the fifth inning Joe started complaining to his team-mates about the condition of the outfield.

     “ ‘There’s nothin’ out there,’ he remarked, ‘but rocks and glass.’

     “ ‘Cutting your feet, Joe?’ someone asked the dissatisfied rookie.

     “ ‘No,’ Jackson said. ‘It ain’t that. But it’s fuzzin’ up the ball and I can’t throw it.’ “

     Jackson’s first official record was with Greenville in the Carolina Association of 1908 where he batted .346. After that Connie Mack lured him to Philadelphia twice, but each time Shoeless Joe became homesick and jumped the club. I first saw him with New Orleans in 1910 and you only had to see him once to know that one of the Masters of Maul had arrived on the scene.

A Classic of Batting Style

     Standing over six feet, and loose-jointed without the slightest touch of tension, he had a free, smooth lash that was hard to forget. A left-handed hitter, he stood with his right foot slightly advanced, the left foot a trifle back, in perfect position to step into the ball and hit against his right leg. This was the batting method that Babe Ruth took for his model when the Babe went in for hitting in a serious way.

     “I wanted to improve my batting,” the Babe says, “so I decided to study the best hitter I could find. Naturally, Ty Cobb was a great hitter, but I wanted to take a fuller swing at the ball and not choke up the bat. After looking them all over I decided Joe Jackson was at the top of the class. The only change I made in following his style was to get my right foot farther advanced, with my left foot farther back so that I almost had my back to the pitcher. You are already partly turned in this way and you have more leverage.

     “Jackson had finally arrived at this method in a natural way, for no one ever taught him how to hit and I know he never tried to copy any other style.”

     In the spring of 1911 Jackson joined the Cleveland club where they had known such hitters as Larry Lajoie, Elmer Flick, Bill Bradly, Nig Clarke, Harry Bemis and a few more who had been punishing pitchers year after year. He came up from New Orleans with a batting average of .354. “Yes,” they said, “but that was in a minor league. The big show is different.”

     In those days it meant something to hit .300 or better. There were only a few in either league who did. The “Carolina Crashsmith,” as Gordon McKay of Philadelphia named Jackson, happened to arrive in fast company just when Ty Cobb was at his peak. Cobb had been stepping away from them all, year after year. But as the season wore along he found this tall, gangling outfield cracking out hit for hit with him. As they came along into the stretch Jackson was hitting doubles and triples and Cobb, one of the star competitors of all time, was beating out infield singles where no one else could have reached first ahead of the ball.

     Shoeless Joe was then just twenty-four years old, and it was his first season under the Big Tent. But when the final returns were in he had a batting average of .408 and Cobb had to reach his top mark, .420, to beat him.

     A year later Cobb again had to put on top speed to pull away from this young Carolina entry, who still had no interest in literature, even to the extent of reading and writing. Cobb that year had to beat .400 again to lead Jackson across the wire as Shoeless Joe finished with .395.

The End of a Great Career

     In 1915 Jackson had his only major league slump. He dropped to .308, with no lively ball to help him, so he was traded to Chicago for Roth, Klepfer and $31,000. In 1916 he began hitting again and moved back to his old pace.

     Joe Jackson had played just ten years of major league baseball before he was banished for his part in the crooked world series of 1919. Both he and Buck Weaver were involved and yet the records show that both played brilliant ball all throughout the tainted show.

     One of Jackson’s last games, possibly his last game, was played in Cleveland. The news of the White Sox scandal had just broken. There was a terrific chorus of boos as Jackson came to bat. His response was a triple or a home run as he raced around the bases, laughing at the hostile crowd.

     Jackson finished his big-league career at the age of thirty-three. He finished with a ten-year batting average of .356, just a few points back of the fast-moving Ty Cobb, well ahead of such stars as Wagner and Lajoie.

     Three years after his banishment I ran across his trail again playing with a semi-pro team in Americus, Georgia. At that time he was batting over .500 and only two days before I found him he had hit three home runs and a triple. It has been eleven years since Jackson was heard of, and yet he is only forty-four.

     Under the code of the game there was nothing else to do except turn him out. And yet when one considers the chance he had in life, his early upbringing and the state of the game in those days, it was a tough break to face. He had never been highly paid for his work in comparison to what far lesser luminaries have drawn since.

     At that time baseball was held in the highest public esteem, and yet it was actually at the lowest moral and ethical level the game has ever known. The shock to baseball’s big public was heavy, and yet in addition to those who were finally drive out, more than one star, fully as guilty as Jackson and others, escaped.

For some reason I have always had more sympathy for Shoeless Joe than all the other offenders. To him it was only part of the business then going on as a steady traffic, just as it is going on today in other sports which lack the close supervision baseball has.