Two Who Paid for Their Sins

This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Volume II (1987).

SAY IT AIN’T SO, JOE! 
The Story of Shoeless Joe Jackson 
By Donald Gropman  
229 pp., illus., Little, Brown & Co., 1979 

ONE LAST ROUND FOR THE SHUFFLER 
By Tom Clark
157 pp., illus., Truck Books/Pomerica Press
1979 Paperback $4.95 (still in print)

 

“Shoeless Joe” Jackson and “Shufflin Phil” Douglas were unequal talents who otherwise shared similarities of background, character, and experience. Both were small-town Southerners in an era when a man’s nature often bore the idiosyncratic stamp of his region. Both were painfully ill-equipped to cope with the demands and diversions of life in major” league cities. Both, by appalling acts of foolish and undisciplined behavior, destroyed their baseball careers. Both returned to their rural environments, where their disgrace was excused or ignored, and each basked in the regard of friends and neighbors to the day he died. 

Jackson, by far the greater player, has achieved almost mythological status. He is Natural Man, prodigious in performance, yet stained beyond redemption and forever denied baseball’s Valhalla at Cooperstown. There are few today who could have seen him at his best, but for generations after the banishment in 1921, baseball men nourished his legend. There was awed admiration for the flawless swing and the screaming liners that tore gloves from outfielders’ hands, and connoisseurs’ appreciation of the anticipatory fielding and opportunistic baserunning. Novelist W.P. Kinsella, a keeper of the flame, writes of Jackson’s glove as “the place where triples go to die.” 

More’s the pity that simple Joe, steadfast in his refusal to become literate, blundered into the Black Sox Scandal. Despite his .375 Series batting average and errorless play afield, he was the confessed recipient of $5,000 of gamblers’ payoff money.  Say it ain’t so, Joe! Indeed. 

Phil was something else again. A hulking six foot five, he was one of the National League’s top righthanders when sober, incorrigible when drunk. He was the blurred image of the good ol’ boy: sly, unreliable, self-pitying, yet amusing when he had a yarn to tell or a song to sing, and a bear-down competitor when his head was clear and the spitball was moving. His peak season was 1921, when he was 15 and 10 for the Giants and contributed two well pitched victories in the winning Series against the Yankees. 

But the liquor demon never left him. Periods of moderate behavior and first-rate pitching were followed by what he called “vacations” when he went AWOL, stupefied himself with drink, and missed tums in the pitching rotation. Fines, suspensions, roommates or gumshoes assigned to tag along and keep him out of saloons — all were unavailing, for all were disciplines imposed from without on a man lacking discipline within. His managers were exasperated but rueful at failing to keep him in line. “There was no harm in that fellow,” said Fred Mitchell of the Cubs. “It was just that I never knew where the hell he was, or whether he was fit to work.” 

Only John McGraw, who never suffered derelictions of duty lightly, treated the Shuffler more in anger than in sorrow. Ultimately, writhing under a particularly savage locker-room tongue lashing, befuddled Phil wrote the letter that would end his career. In it, he offered to desert the Giants — “take the next train home” — if he were given “an inducement.” It was a wretched effort to strike at McGraw’s pennant hopes, but unforgivably ill timed since the 1922 race was approaching the stretch. 

Worse, it was written to a straitlaced Cardinal outfielder, Leslie Mann, who would never fall in with such a dumb scheme or overlook it as an aberration. 

The letter quickly found its way to Commissioner Landis. In a more temperate time, like today, Phil’s alcoholic derangement (and the fact that nothing came of his bizarre offer) probably would be judged as treatable illness and rehabilitation begun. In 1922, a year after Joe Jackson was cast into darkness, baseball was still scrubbing the tarnish from its reputation, and Landis still was dealing with a muddle of bets, bribes, and collusions affecting the outcome of games. After a hearing attended only by the furious McGraw, Landis added Phil Douglas to the lengthening list of players permanently barred from baseball. 

Even discounting their abrupt departures from the game, Joe and Phil, like all players, had much longer lives outside baseball than in, and both authors — Clark even more than Gropman — give commendable weight to the years of aspiration and the years of exile. Both biographies end as they begin, in the cotton-mill and mining towns where Joe and Phil were known, accepted, and to some extent healed. Gropman has the better, if more family, subject. Joe achieved more and had farther to fall, but he started a dry-cleaning business with his capable wife, Katie, did well at it, swung Black Betsy in semi-pro or outlaw games, and made more money than he ever did with the cheapskate Comiskey. In time he recovered a good measure of dignity. Clark has the sadder story. Phil had a shorter, more erratic career and was stunned by its drastic conclusion. He was impoverished by the loss of his baseball income and lived marginally on handout jobs. Still, his family was loyal and supportive; they genuinely liked him and their memories of him are warm, despite the booze.

Gropman’s is the more substantial book. His account of Joe’s career with the A’s, Indians, and White Sox is comprehensive. Connie Mack comes off as less than a genius, standing by as his hard-edge A’s taunt and jeer the unlettered Jackson into ineffectiveness, then trading him even up for journeyman Bris Lord because he wants to do Cleveland owner Charlie Somers a favor. Come on! 

Coverage of the Black Sox mess is accurate, though standard. By now, there’s probably nothing to add to Asinof’s Eight Men Out and Veeck’s Hustler’s Handbook, or, for that matter, John Lardner’s authoritative “Remember the Black Sox?” in a 1938 Saturday Evening Post. 

One Lost Round contains some small factual errors, and reports conversations – such as what transpired at the Landis hearing – without attribution, although it would be useful to know whether a verbatim transcript exists, or only Phil’s (or Landis’) recollections. Clark makes Douglas out to be a greater pitcher than his record (93-93 lifetime) seems to warrant, and I feel that he rationalizes, and even finds some redeeming charm in, the Shuffler’s alcoholic personality. McGraw may well have been the ogre he appears to be, but Phil was a serious case. He couldn’t even manage to be one of the clever drunks – after hours, between turns, on days off- of whom old-time baseball was so tolerant. To regard him too generously skews our sense of how acute his pain must have been. 

That said, it must also be acknowledged that both books have been diligently researched, particularly in the Southern purlieus of family and friends, but also through newsmen and players who were Joe’s and Phil’s contemporaries. The authors also are fascinating and unsparing in their accounts of the casual tyranny of baseball’s lords and masters. By today’s standards the treatment of both Jackson and Douglas was an outrageous violation of legal and human rights. 

Both men played as opportunity offered until their mid-forties, vestiges of their marvelous skills evident to the end. They died within a year of each other: Joe at sixty-four in 1951, Phil at sixty-two in 1952. There is no suggestion in either book that they ever met.