I was reading the Sporting News a few days ago and I was surprised to see an opinion piece by Dave Kindred about Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Hall of Fame.
Kindred's article in the magazine itself (not on the website) was called "A Shoeless, Clueless Schmo," and expressed the opinion that both Rose and Jackson should be allowed into the Hall despite their transgressions.For those of you unfamiliar with the Shoeless Joe story, Joe Jackson was an illiterate South Carolina millhand who got to the major leagues and became one of the greatest hitters in the game. Jackson hit .356 for his career, the third highest average in history, and batted .408 as a rookie in 1911. Later, however, Jackson got involved in the World Series scandal of 1919, after which he and seven of his teammates were kicked out of baseball for life. Jackson died in 1951, but he's still in the public eye through books like "Eight Men Out" and the movie "Field of Dreams," in which Jackson's ghost figures prominently. Now a new campaign, headed by Iowa's Senator Tom Harkin, wants Jackson's name cleared so that Shoeless Joe can be elected posthumously to the Hall of Fame.
"Pariahs both, Rose and Jackson belong in the darknesses of their own creation," said Kindred. "They also belong in the Hall of Fame. They were extraordinary players whose absence diminishes the game's history. Just put the sad stories on their plaques. Let them read as cautionary tales."
Then I went into the Sporting News website today and what do I find? Kindred wrote another piece a week later on the same subject. He changed his mind! Now he says that neither Rose nor Jackson belong in the Hall!
"In the end," said Kindred, "I believe Jackson and Rose toyed with the idea that is at the heart of the game, that the games can be trusted, that what happens between the white lines is true. Whether or not Ty Cobb was a racist, whether or not Babe Ruth was a drunk, their pathologies were irrelevant to the game itself. But in the cases of Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, they aimed a dagger at the game's heart."
You can see the Sporting News website at
http://www.thesportingnews.com. Click on the "Experts" button and go to Dave Kindred's page to read both stories. But you've got to promise to come back here, OK?Are you back? Good.
I'm writing a biography of Shoeless Joe Jackson. I'm doing it for two reasons - because I find Jackson's story incredibly interesting, and because all the other biographies of Jackson are terrible. Most of the other books about Jackson take all his protestations of innocence at face value, and turn him into some kind of poor, pathetic martyr, sacrificed so that baseball can look "clean" again after a decade full of scandals. Jackson's defenders willfully ignore the fact that Jackson took $5,000 (and was promised $20,000) to throw the 1919 World Series.
Jackson was suspended from baseball in September of 1920 when the scandal broke. I can't, for the life of me, imagine how the first Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Landis, could have let Jackson stay in baseball after all the facts became known. I'll post some pieces of my book here later on, though if you want to read the whole thing, you'll have to buy it.
Speaking of websites, here's another one for you. The "Virtual Hall of Fame" for Joe Jackson is at
http://www.blackbetsy.com. Black Betsy is the name of Jackson's favorite bat (yes, he named all his bats). You can go look at it, but come right back, OK?Hello again. Anyway, I think Dave Kindred had it half right each time, since I'd put Rose in the Hall of Fame but not Jackson. However, Kindred's flip-flopping bothers me no end. I don't think I've ever written such a strongly-worded opinion piece and then taken it all back only seven days later.
Maybe I'm asking a little too much from a sporting magazine, but "whoops, I changed my mind" is a little unnerving no matter where it occurs. I know that the Sporting News is not the New York Times and that Kindred is not writing about war and peace. However, every time I read one of Kindred's passionate opinion pieces from now on, I'll wonder if he'll say "never mind" in a week or so. Talk about destroying your credibility.
Makes you wonder who the "clueless schmo" really is.