In the second decade of this century, baseball was considered the national pastime both in spirit and in fact. It was a source of American mythology, transforming big league players into larger than life heroes.
Today we have dozens of superstars, but none receive the adulation given to Joe Jackson.
They called him Shoeless Joe and he could throw a baseball over four hundred feet. He batted .408 in his first full season in the American League, and his lifetime batting average of .358 is among the highest in major league history. His greatest rival was Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth copied his swing. Joe Jackson is generally considered the greatest natural hitter ever.
Nicknamed Shoeless Joe, Jackson was a natural candidate to be enshrined in baseball's Hall of Fame. But he fell from grace as a result of his implication in the most notorious sports scandal in American history, the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Jackson and seven teammates on the Chicago White Sox team were indicted for conspiring to throw the series to the Cincinnati Reds. Though tried and found innocent, all eight players were banned from baseball for life.
"Say It Ain't So, Joe" clarifies Jackson's role in the scandal, and new evidence makes a convincing case for his innocence. In a rich combination of biography and social history, the book traces Jackson's life from the cotton mills of South Carolina (where he went to work at the age of six) to baseball stardom. Jackson himself emerges as one of the most talented athletes who ever played the game and as a man whose name and public image were unfairly disgraced.
Joe Jackson is currently on the "ineligible list", but someday the Commissioner of Baseball may reinstate him and make Jackson eligible for induction into the Hall of Fame.
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