Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson (review)

David L. Fleitz. Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 2001. 314 pp. Paper, $29.95.

Professional baseball has endured scandals of varying magnitude during its 125-plus-year history. Regardless of number or magnitude, the most widely known, and one that just won't die, is the eighty-two-year-old Black Sox scandal, which expelled eight players from the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Of the "eight men out," the story of Shoeless Joe Jackson is the most frequently told. Author David Fleitz's Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jacksonis one of many books on the subject over the years, and one of three this year published by McFarland that focuses on this black mark on America's game.

Most sports fans, and baseball fans in particular, are familiar with Shoeless Joe's story: a poor illiterate southerner from a South Carolina mill town who rose through baseball's ranks to be, according to some, the greatest left-handed hitter in the game. Whether myth or fact, the legend has been kept alive by past and present figures within and outside the game. Even Babe Ruth made his contribution, once saying to sportswriter Grantland Rice, "I copied my swing after Joe Jackson's" (pp.163-64). Jackson was one of the first players to hit for power as well as average, and his fielding has often been touted—for example, the 1989 movie Field of Dreamsreferred to his glove as "where triples went to die" (p.277).

Regardless of truth, myth, or legend, Fleitz's well-researched and excellent narrative presents Jackson as a tragic figure whose fall from baseball grace was inevitable regardless of his ability, positing that events during his entire life were a prelude to his baseball demise.

Perhaps this tragic nonavoidance can be traced to Jackson's youth and his early discontent with his economic situation. Growing up in the poverty and ignorance that often characterized South Carolina mill towns of the period, Joe began working alongside his father and brothers in the Brandon Mill, in Greenville, South Carolina, before age thirteen. By age fifteen, his earnings exceeded the average pay of most mill workers (due to extra compensation for his exploits on the baseball diamond with mill league teams), but he was always looking for ways to make an extra buck.

As Jackson's baseball prowess advanced him from mill leagues to the class D Carolina Association, he more than doubled his mill wages when he promised to leave corn whiskey alone and "play my head off for $75 a month" (p.13). As he rose through the minors and into the majors, he continually sought ways to supplement his income doing advertising endorsements and making vaudeville appearances. But even with his supplementary ventures, compared to other ballplayers of lesser ability Jackson was grossly underpaid, due in part to his poor negotiating skills and the misfortune of playing for greedy owners. Fleitz points to notoriously stingy White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, who paid Jackson the same $6,000 salary that Comiskey himself received as player-manager of the St. Louis Browns in the 1880s.

About 40 percent of Shoelessdeals with Jackson's early upbringing and his career prior to joining the White Sox. Fleitz provides in-depth detail of the difficulties a rural, uneducated southern boy had adjusting to Major League life in northern metropolitan cities. This was especially true in Philadelphia as Jackson found it difficult to adjust to the city's "tough" fans, compounded with bouts of homesickness and the insecurities of being around better-educated teammates. Fleitz points out that Jackson's inability to acclimate to big-city life prompted A's manager Connie Mack to trade him to Cleveland, where he enjoyed several outstanding seasons. But Jackson never really adjusted to city life in the North.

The fateful move...