Once and for all: Did Shoeless Joe Jackson play to win in the 1919 Series?
Looking game-by-game at Chicago White Sox outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson embroiled in the “Black Sox” scandal Series that shook baseball.
Last year was the anniversary of the 1919 World Series. The season to come will be the centenary of season-long rumors exploding into actuality, when a published accusation led to a grand jury, to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey suspending seven players accused of conspiring with gamblers to throw the Series (an eighth, Chick Gandil, retired before the 1920 season after a contract dispute), and to pitcher Eddie Cicotte confessing to the grand jury, detonating the scandal in earnest.
Enough of the mythology around that Series and the scandal to follow has been debunked profoundly by the Society for American Baseball Research. (Fair disclosure: I’m a member myself, and I authored an essay for their Black Sox Scandal Committee’s newsletter in December 2018, arguing that the 1919 Cincinnati Reds could have won the Series if it was played straight, no chaser.) You can (and should) read it elsewhere.
This past weekend, according to ESPN reporter Dan Van Atta, who produced a Backstory segment on players banished from baseball for life, someone from MLB (Van Atta didn’t identify him) suggested death might actually end such banishment, but someone else from the Hall of Fame said not so fast. Two players who would-be Hall of Famers otherwise remain on the list. One remains dead, the other is alive and 78 years old, and gambling was their downfall.
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Shoeless Joe Jackson is one of the White Sox’s Eight Men Out thanks to the 1919 World Series fix. Pete Rose is banished because he broke the rule provoked directly by the Black Sox scandal and its exposure of the rampant game fixings under gamblers’ financing in baseball’s earliest history.
I’m not going to re-argue the Rose case or re-examine the complete depth of the Black Sox scandal here. What I’m going to do is look objectively at the 1919 Series to answer a question that’s always resurrected whenever anyone has occasion to look at that scandal: Did Jackson really play to win in the 1919 Series?
Set aside for now whether Jackson was or wasn’t ambivalent about the Series plot. Set aside that yes, he did accept an envelope containing a $5,000 payoff, however ambivalent he did or didn’t feel about it, however long it took him to speak up about it. Set aside everything else in those games, everything else the White Sox did or didn’t do, everything else the Reds did or didn’t do. (Including the fact that as good as the Reds’ pitching proved to be, their defense made things even more challenging for them as often as not.)
Jackson’s sympathizers point continuously to his 1919 World Series slash line: that .375 batting average, that .394 on-base percentage, that .563 slugging percentage, that .956 OPS. If that’s the only thing you see of his Series performance, not to mention five runs scored and six driven in, you’d think—no matter what the shenanigans around him were—that, no, he really wasn’t trying to go into the tank.
What does a closer look show? Let’s look only at Jackson batting in the Series with men on base. He batted fifteen such times, with six hits, four driven in, one strikeout, and twice reaching on errors. (.400 BA.) Still credible, right?
But now let’s take it with the absolute closest look possible. Game by game, score by score, situation by situation, every time he checked in at the plate with men on base. Consider, too, that on the regular season the 1919 White Sox were a better-hitting team but the 1919 Reds were actually the better-pitching team. (As Mr. Thurber said, yes, you can look it up.)
Did Shoeless Joe Jackson play to win in the 1919 Series?
This, then, was Shoeless Joe Jackson in the 1919 World Series:
Game One—Jackson batted once with men on. First and second in the sixth, and the White Sox in the hole, 6-1. The runners moved up a base each when Jackson grounded out. And, yes, a base hit might have sent at least one and maybe both home, cutting the deficit exactly in half and keeping the White Sox within reach.
Game Two—Jackson batted twice with men on. With no score, a man on first, and nobody out, he singled in the fourth to make it first and second, but both men were stranded. He batted with a man on second, one out, and the White Sox down 3-0 in the sixth, and looked at a third strike.
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Game Three—With the White Sox up 2-0 (and Clean Sox pitcher Dickey Kerr en route a 3-0 shutout), Jackson batted with first and second and nobody out in the third . . . and bunted a pop out to first base. He scored the game’s first run after leading off the second with a single and coming home on co-conspirator Chick Gandil’s single but otherwise had nothing to do with the game score.
Game Four—With no score and two on, Jackson reached on an infield error to load the bases for . . . an inning-ending ground out. It was his only plate appearance of the game with men on base, and while he did load the bases a base hit would have broken the scoreless tie.
Game Five—This time, Shoeless Joe batted twice with men on. With no score and two aboard in the third, he popped out to third. With the White Sox down five and a man on third with two out in the bottom of the ninth, he grounded out.
Game Six—Jackson got to bat three times with men on. No score, man on first, the bottom of the first: pop out to third. The White Sox down three with nobody out and a man on second in the sixth—he singled home their second run of the game. Top of the tenth, tied at four, and a leadoff double ahead of him—beat out a bunt single to put what proved the winning run ninety feet from home.
Game Seven—Once again Shoeless Joe got to hit three times with men on base, and again he rose to the occasion twice. Top of the first, no score, two out, and a man on second—RBI single to left. Top of the third, the White Sox still up 1-0 and a man on second despite a line-drive double play—RBI single to left. Top of the fifth, still 2-0 White Sox, first and second—his grounder becomes an error to load the bases, leading to the third White Sox run.
Game Eight—The good news: Jackson had his most plate appearances with men on base of any game in the Series—four. He also hit the only home run of the Series for either team, a two-out solo shot in the third.
The bad news: the Reds trashed too-trashable co-conspirator Lefty Williams in the top of the first and rebuffed any and all White Sox attempts to recuperate and overcome. (Before you ask, “What about Lefty Williams and/or his wife being threatened before the game?” the answer is—it didn’t happen.)
Jackson batted in the bottom of the first with the Sox in the 4-0 hole, one out, and first and third. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: he popped out behind third base. He batted after Buck Weaver’s leadoff single in the bottom of the sixth, with the Sox in the deeper hole, 9-1—fly out to center field. In the 10-1 hole with one out and second and third in the bottom of the eighth—two-run double.
After the White Sox went from there to finish the eighth cutting the deficit to 10-5, Jackson batted in the bottom of the ninth with second and third and two out . . . and grounded out to second for game, set, and Series loss.
The 1919 World Series was set up as a best of nine, as it would be in 1920-21 before reverting to the best-of-seven. In the first five games, Jackson batted six times with men on base, got one base hit, and reached on an error once, without scoring or driving in a single run. That’s a .167 batting average with men on base for that span. The White Sox ended Game Five in a 4-1 Series hole, and in the only win through that point, Shoeless Joe scored the first of the White Sox’s three runs after leading off with a hit.
Then the White Sox played three straight elimination games and won the first two. Jackson batted ten times with men on base in those three games, got five hits, and reached on an error once. But in the third of those games—the absolute last chance for the White Sox to stay alive—he went 1-for-4 with men on base and drove in two runs with that hit when the game was still far enough beyond reach.
“That Joe Jackson was a likable fellow and persistent in his claims of innocence does not change the historical record,” wrote Bill Lamb, a longtime New Jersey prosecutor and author of Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial, and Civil Litigation, in SABR’s Baseball Research Journal for spring 2019.
On the evidence, the call is not a close one . . . As he admitted under oath after first being confronted, Jackson was a knowing, if perhaps unenthusiastic, participant in the plot to fix the 1919 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 game that he loved while still in the prime of his career, is a sad figure. But hardly an innocent one.
In 1920, Jackson posted a terrific season even amidst rumors of the White Sox continuing to tank games, until the late September published accusations started the chain reaction that battered baseball.
Jackson didn’t really appear to start playing to win in the 1919 Series—for whatever reasons—until the White Sox faced elimination having won only one of the first five games. In a third straight elimination game, Jackson and the White Sox showed up a couple of hours late and about five bucks short.
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That’s the game record as it really was. We don’t have to love or even like it, especially because it did involve one of baseball’s genuine greats. We have only to acknowledge it.