Cory Franklin: The lessons of ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson and the MLB’s rewriting of history

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred in recent months removed Pete Rose s permanent ban from baseball which will make him eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame Manfred reinstated other banned players as well including members of the infamous Chicago White Sox who threw the World Series including the unit s star Shoeless Joe Jackson This undated file photo shows baseball athlete athlete Shoeless Joe Jackson AP Photo File The reinstatement was an obvious sop to the gambling industry an MLB partner and possibly also to President Donald Trump who lobbied for Rose s future vote into the Hall of Fame Manfred offered a tone-deaf rationale for reinstating this MLB s rogues gallery Obviously a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the match Whatever else Manfred learned at Harvard Law School history s lessons failed to make the curriculum Understanding history human nature mistakes made and the significance of previous cultures is essential to cultivating integrity The nature of history is that no matter how a large number of accounts we read about an event whether it s Napoleon Bonaparte s Russia campaign the Titanic sinking or the assassination of John F Kennedy we can never know precisely what people were thinking how they acted and why But whatever history is ultimately knowable certain falsehoods and myths can be dispelled This is where over years later Jackson a central figure in the Series fix provides a lesson about how subtle the lack of integrity can be The story now circulating with ever greater popularity is that Jackson was an innocent bystander in the World Series fix Asserts of his innocence rest on two facts He hit including the only home run of the Series and he was never convicted in a court of law The first demonstrates how statistics can mislead By the accounts of other players the Sox deliberately lost five games the World Series was then best of nine and they apparently played honestly in two or three In the first four games that the Sox lost Jackson got no RBIs He raised his average remarkably in the three games they won but his only home run of the Series along with a base-clearing double came in the fixed final encounter clincher with the Sox already facing an insurmountable lead and the Series outcome no longer in doubt Jackson s impressive World Series statistics were the conclusion of his poor performance in four fixed games three games he tried to win and one competition in which his contribution didn t matter in a rigged blowout loss to Cincinnati Although Jackson committed no errors his fielding was likewise suspect A granular analysis of Jackson s performance by baseball blogger Dan Holmes reveals his lackluster efforts in the field critically in both Games One and Two The presiding judge in a subsequent civil suit recalled that Jackson had explained him that he had made no misplays that could be noticed by the ordinary person but that he did not play his best Regarding his courtroom exoneration and that of the other Black Sox they were identified not guilty of conspiracy which is different from innocent primarily because the charges were nebulous they were charged with conspiracy because fixing baseball games was not a crime and the Chicago jurors loved their hometown heroes Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis summarily banned the players permanently restoring honesty to the encounter and saving baseball along with the help of superstar Babe Ruth s popularity Bill Lamb a longtime state and county prosecutor in New Jersey an authority on the embarrassment and author of Black Sox in the Courtroom The Grand Jury Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation has analyzed the legal machinations He points out Jackson originally admitted in grand jury testimony to being involved in the fix Then in a later civil trial against the band he recanted his sworn testimony essentially committing perjury Lamb poses other questions including why the other fixers would all implicate Jackson if he were innocent and why Jackson who claimed he wished to return the he received he was promised eventually deposited it in a Georgia bank near his home Lamb concludes That Joe Jackson was a likable fellow and persistent in his states of innocence does not change the historical record On the evidence the call is not a close one Lamb wrote in for the Society for American Baseball Research Related Articles Clive Crook The US is about to discover if deficits don t matter Parmy Olson AI sometimes deceives to survive Does anybody care Maureen Dowd Dance with emolument Ezra Klein Trump s BBB Big Budget Bomb Snoey Morocco The urgency in emergency medicine As he admitted under oath after first being confronted Jackson was a knowing if perhaps unenthusiastic participant in the plot to fix the World Series And damningly Jackson was just as persistent in his demands to be paid his promised fix payoff money as the Series progressed as he would later be in his disavowals of fix involvement In the final analysis Shoeless Joe Jackson banished from playing the tournament that he loved while still in the prime of his career is a sad figure But hardly an innocent one Manfred may not realize that baseball civilization has reliably reflected the larger societal tradition His reinstatement of Rose and Jackson is no exception History has become an irrelevant triviality ignored or even better forgotten Ethics are now a bore since unethical behavior can consistently be papered over with tricks such as deceptive statistics and abstruse legal arguments Nothing good can come of this Dr Cory Franklin is a retired intensive care physician He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune