The Endurance of Black Sox Mythology: Narrative Conventions and Poetic Form

Historians and scholars of the Big Fix and the Black Sox Scandal often bemoan the endurance of myths about the 1919 World Series and its aftermath.1 Thanks to a complicated interplay between evolving literary representations of the events of 1919-20 and popular films like Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, mention of “the Black Sox” calls forth a host of myths, chief among them that Charles Comiskey was a cheapskate owner who underpaid his team despite their greatness, and that the ballplayers were naive dupes enticed by slick gamblers like Sport Sullivan and Arnold Rothstein. The reality that Comiskey was no cheaper than any other owner and that players Chick Gandil and Eddie Cicotte approached the gamblers just hasn’t gained cultural traction beyond SABR circles, despite corrective journalism and other media representations of the historical reality.

Of course, “myth” has more than one definition: According to Merriam-Webster, one is “an unfounded or false notion,” something contrary to the facts. Another, however, matters more: “a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.”2 Despite their thorough debunking by SABR researchers, the myths synch with widespread American worldviews; their endurance results from aspects of how the Black Sox narrative plays into certain tropes of American literature, and the poetic power of the one key phrase instantly recognized even beyond the world of baseball fans: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”3

Though today people militate to reinstate Shoeless Joe Jackson and place him in the Hall of Fame while Comiskey is derided, originally the dynamic of blame was the other way around. As Daniel Nathan has explored in Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal, Comiskey was not the villain. He and countless fans were the victim of ballplayers and gamblers who betrayed ideals of sport and manhood that were thought to be the very basis of a uniquely American identity expressed through the national game.4

Many fans—a very few of whom became writers representing these cultural events—had refused to believe history even when it was happening right in front of them. James T. Farrell, in the essay “I Remember the Black Sox,” writes the following account of a supposed incident late in the 1920 season, after a Sox home game:

I went with the crowd and trailed about five feet behind Jackson and Felsch. They walked somewhat slowly. A fan called out:

“It ain’t true, Joe!”

The two suspected players did not turn back. They walked on, slowly. The crowd took up this cry and more than once, men and boys called out and repeated:

“It ain’t true, Joe!”5

No one has corroborated Farrell’s memory of this incident, and the American popular imagination embraced the mythic “Say it ain’t so, Joe” instead.

But Farrell is not the key literary figure in the path to reverse the myths: his fellow Chicagoan and White Sox fan Nelson Algren is. About a generation after the events of the 1919 World Series—and Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s banishment of the eight Black Sox “regardless of the verdict of juries”6—Algren began to turn that narrative around, first in his 1942 poem “The Swede Was a Hard Guy.”7 He continued in a 1951 representation of the scandal in “The Silver-Colored Yesterday.”8 His reversal culminates in the 1973 mixed-genre prose poem “Ballet for Opening Day: The Swede Was a Hard Guy.”9

In each of these works, Algren depicts the players as victims of Comiskey’s miserliness and the gamblers’ guiles, especially Shoeless Joe Jackson. Beyond any readers who might have been swayed directly by Algren, these mythic representations clearly influenced later writers and filmmakers.

To teach these mythic texts, and to challenge students to accept the reality, can be frustrating, but only if we fail to grapple with why the myths endure. Rebecca Kell, a student in “Baseball in American Narratives”—a class in the Big Fix’s centennial year of 2019—helped me understand one key reason why the myths endure. After reading Algren and screening Eight Men Out, when presented with the historical reality in “Eight Myths Out,” she replied: OK, then, if I cannot blame Comiskey, I’ll blame Rothstein.10 She argued that even if Gandil and Risberg and Cicotte initiated the Fix, the gamblers nonetheless were taking advantage of players who were all outsiders and underdogs, and who therefore deserved the sympathy of readers rather than condemnation. Most of them didn’t even get paid! Sure, they were wrong to throw the Series, but they had justifications that suffice.

While a philosophical purist might argue with the situational morality here (the gamblers, Jewish Arnold Rothstein and Irish-American Sport Sullivan were also outsiders in their own ways), her argument resonates with a powerful tradition in American narrative literature of rooting for the outsider and the underdog against the dominant culture. From Hester Prynne to Huck Finn to Jay Gatsby to Tom Joad to John Yossarian to Randall Patrick McMurphy—just to name a few canonical literary figures—American authors, and by extension American audiences, tend to side with the marginalized.11

In “Ballet for Opening Day,” Algren describes the White Sox ballplayers as all coming from regional or class subject positions outside of the dominant in American culture. Gandil had “been riding the Western rails since boyhood.” Weaver had “come west from soft-coal country” in Pennsylvania. Risberg was “a rangy San Franciscan,” and a “grammar-school dropout.” Felsch also was a dropout, a factory worker and bartender from Milwaukee. Cicotte was “a French-Canadian family man.” Williams was a “Missourian who kept his grievances to himself.”

Most importantly for the coming filmic mythology, “Joseph Jefferson [sic] Jackson was an illiterate son of an illiterate share-cropper … [whose] … flaw was fear. He saw himself as an ignorant rube among erudite city-wise Northerners.”12 Jackson’s greatness, a putative inability to play bad baseball, is central to “The Silver-Colored Yesterday.” In that story, young Algren, surrounded by Cubs fans, is challenged for his embrace of Swede Risberg as his “fayvrut player.” After the Scandal breaks, Algren laments:

Out of the welter of accusations, half denials and sudden silences a single fact drifted down: that Shoeless Joe Jackson couldn’t play bad baseball even if he were trying to. He hit .375 that series and played errorless ball, doing everything a major-leaguer could do to win. Nearing sixty today, he could probably still outhit anything now wearing a National League uniform.13

It seems highly unlikely that an elderly Joe Jackson would outhit anyone at that point, but such exaggeration comes naturally to the process of mythologizing the larger-than-life heroes of the past.

Algren’s depictions are central to the groundbreaking journalistic representation of the Big Fix, Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out. Together, Algren and Asinof create a skein of interwoven myths using each other’s work as sources. Asinof quotes Algren four times, and even ends his book with the conclusion of Algren’s 1942 poem, depicting Shoeless Joe as a tragic figure whose ghost haunts the game:

Who made an X for his name and couldn’t

argue with Comiskey’s sleepers.

But who could pick a line drive out of the air

ten feet outside the foul line

And rifle anything home from anywhere in

the park.

For Shoeless Joe is gone, long gone,

A long yellow grass-blade between his teeth

And the bleacher shadows behind him…14

Later, Algren quotes a paragraph from Asinof’s depiction of Cicotte as an epigraph to the 1973 “Ballet for Opening Day.” That paragraph reinforces the “Comiskey was a cheapskate” myth, and sets up the entire thrust of Algren’s last version of the Black Sox story:

[Cicotte] had grown up believing it was talent that made a man big. If you were good enough, and dedicated yourself, you could get to the top. […] In the few years he had been up, they had always praised him and made him feel like a hero to the people of America. But all the time they paid him peanuts. […] Meanwhile, Comiskey made a half million dollars a year on Cicotte’s right arm.15

The evocation of the classic American Dream narrative, the idea that talent and hard work would be rewarded, resonates with the characters’ arcs common in “the Great American Novel,” and creates the narrative framework that entices readers to accept the myth of Comiskey as an exploiter of his athletes.

Like an intergenerational Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, it’s Algren to Asinof and back to Algren for a 3-6-3 mythic double play. Other writers join in a pepper game of spread-the-myths, including Tony Fitzpatrick and, most importantly, W.P. Kinsella. In his epic Chicago poem BumTown, Fitzpatrick defines Comiskey Park as a “shrine/The Old Roman built/On the backs of underpaid/Ballplayers. So cheap was Comiskey/That he’d only launder uniforms/Once a week.’’16 Kinsella, in his novel Shoeless Joe, from which Field of Dreams was adapted, writes:

‘[Jackson] hit .375 against the Reds in the 1919 World Series and played errorless ball,’ my father would say. ‘Twelve hits in an eight-game series. And they suspended him,’ Father would cry. Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.17

The odd locution “played errorless ball” is directly from Algren, and shows the influence all of these writers had on each other. These writers, all clearly having read and been influenced by each other, weave the myths out of strands of reality. Jackson did indeed bat .375, and owners sure enough made more money than players. The dynamic of dominance and marginality here is the paraffin that makes the shine ball of mythology so hard to hit: along with their other ethnic or regional outsider identities, the players occupied subject positions at the bottom of the hierarchy of class.

But for every baseball fan who has read Algren, Farrell, Fitzpatrick, or Kinsella, maybe ten thousand have watched Eight Men Out and a million have seen Field of Dreams. John Sayles’ 1988 adaptation of Eight Men Out explicitly extends the mythologies created by Algren and Asinof. The film depicts the players as an exploited working class, profited off of by greedy capitalist owners and slick gamblers. Vivid performances by the film’s ensemble, especially D.B. Sweeney as Jackson, David Strathairn as Cicotte, and John Cusack as Weaver, evoke sympathy for the players which overwhelms the reality.18

In the movie’s coda, Jackson plays in a run-down minor league stadium under an assumed name. A fan thinks it’s Joe Jackson after he has hit two homers and a double, and then makes a spectacular catch. But Buck Weaver, sitting forlornly nearby, says it isn’t him. After he strokes a triple, some fans now are sure they know who he is despite his alias, “Brown.” A child asks “Who’s Joe Jackson?” and is told he is “one of them guys that threw the Series back in ’19. One of them bums from Chicago, kid. One of the Black Sox.”19

Ironically, this scene shows the original embrace by fans of the reality that the players were guilty. This taste of truth, however, is overwhelmed by the film’s primary depiction of the players as exploited outsiders only driven to throw the Series because of Comiskey’s cheapness. Of course, the film centers on the scene on the courthouse steps where the urban urchin who worshipped Jackson cries out, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

Field of Dreams extends the mythology even further. That film’s depiction of Shoeless Joe Jackson as someone who just wanted to play ball, who would play for free, for the pure pleasure of the game, is a mirror image of the condemnation the players originally received for being greedy.20 The ghost of Jackson is restored to the status of the pure hero, where belief in him can redeem you and restore broken connections between fathers and sons.21

But more than narrative convention perpetuates the mythology. Poetry also matters. The phrase “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” has a certain magic to it.22

Like all the best slogans, ditties, chants, and nursery rhymes, this plaint is made memorable through internal rhyme, alliteration, and rhythmic mirroring.

The sentence is thick with rhyming vowel sounds: “Say” rhymes with “ai(n’t)”; “so” rhymes with “Joe”. And because “it” alliterates with “(ain’)t”, our ear is tempted to hear “ain’t” as an almost-rhyme for “say’t”.

So there’s a near-rhyme pair in the first half of the sentence and a full rhyme pair in the second, effectively dividing the sentence into two hemistichs (half-lines): “say it ain’t” and “so, Joe,” a structure further supported by two strong beats in each half:

where the x’s stand for vocal stress and the a’s and b’s mark the rhyme pairs. The twin sibilance of “say” and “so” (both words at the start of their hemistich) knit the two halves together.

As for rhythm: the line starts with a strong, stressed syllable on the imperative verb “Say”—a real command. Followed by an unstressed syllable, the phrase establishes a trochee, a falling rhythm. This initial trochee encourages us to stress “ain’t” a little more than we otherwise might; we naturally want to alternate strong stress and weak stress, an on-off or off-on motion like a heartbeat or wave. Repeating this motion is what creates rhythm.

Therefore, after the stress of “ain’t,” our ear expects another weak syllable, but instead we have to stress “so,” a small word that carries a great deal of the sentence’s castigation and regret in its sibilant hiss (and doesn’t “so” conjure “no”?) The comma then pauses us, making our leap onto the final single syllable even stronger than it naturally is—proper nouns are always stressed. This means we have three stresses in a row at the end of the sentence: ain’t so, Joe! Wherever stresses cluster and crowd, they create great force and weight, further underscoring the lament.

Thinking of this as a chant, we’re basically going to shout four stressed words, almost eliding over the “it”—SAY (it) AIN’T SO JOE. We can clap that out, it’s a regular 1-2-3-4 musical phrase, with the “it” touching ever so lightly on the downbeat.

And surely the slangy “ain’t” has something to do with the pleasure of the sentence.

In his 1942 poem, Algren misquotes the original as “Say it isn’t so, Joe.” Some form of lyric natural selection led the more poetic version to endlessly reproduce and thrive. This line, recycled by a legion of sports-page headline writers and quoted out of context in countless situations unrelated to baseball, is the poetic reason why myths of the Black Sox endure.23

In short, poetry and narrative defeat history every time.

Myths that coincide with readers’ or viewers’ ingrained predispositions regarding fictional characters (even those based on real-life people) influence how they interpret narratives. The power of poetic form can drill a mythic sentence into the public consciousness so deeply that it cannot be overcome by prosaic facts. Yogi Berra or Casey Stengel may or may not have said that “Good pitching beats good hitting, and vice-versa,”24 but the endurance of the myths surrounding the Big Fix and the Black Sox Scandal suggest that good storytelling and poetry beat good history rather than the other way around. 

BILL SAVAGE is a longtime SABR member and has taught courses on baseball film, fiction, comic books, and poetry at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library of Chicago since 1995. He delivered an earlier version of this essay at the SABR Black Sox Scandal Centennial Symposium at the Chicago History Museum in 2019. A Chicago Cubs season ticket holder, he wrote a fan’s point-of-view column during the Cubs 2016 World Series run for ESPN.com, “The View from Section 416.”

S.P. DONOHUE’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in journals, most recently in Seneca Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. On the Northwestern University faculty since 1998, she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs.

 

Notes

1. Professor Savage teaches the course “Baseball in American Narratives”; Professor Donohue teaches courses on creative writing, including technical matters of poetic form. Their distinct contributions to this essay should be clear.

2. Merriam-Webster, online edition. “Myth,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myth?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld. Accessed March 6, 2023.

3. See Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White sox, ed. Jacob Pomrenke (Phoenix: SABR, 2015). Also Eight Myths Out, https://sabr.org/eight- myths-out, accessed March 6, 2023.

4. Daniel Nathan, Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 11-57.

5. James T. Farrell, My Baseball Diary (Carbonsdale and Evansville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 106.

6. Quoted in Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (New York: Henry Holt, 1963), 273.

7. Nelson Algren, “The Swede Was a Hard Guy.” Southern Review, Spring 1942, 873-79.

8. Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make. 60th Anniversary Annotated Edition, David Schmittgens and Bill Savage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

9. Nelson Algren. “Ballet for Opening Day: The Swede Was a Hard Guy.” The Last Carousel (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1973) 268-98.

10. This paraphrase has been cleared with Ms. Kell. She also made a most cogent critique of Bull Durham, describing it as a sex-positive film about non-toxic masculinity. To paraphrase Nuke Laloosh: That’s deep. Think about it.

11. I note the masculinist bias of this roster of “Great American Characters.” I would add that rooting for the outsider is a powerful factor in representations of women’s baseball, from Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own to the recent television series of the same title.

12. Algren, Last Carousel, 270-75.

13. Algren, Chicago: City on the Make, 38.

14. Asinof truncated Algren’s poem; this truncated version appears in Eight Men Out, 293. The original was in Southern Review, 878-79.

15. This appears in Asinof, 257. In Algren, The Last Carousel, 268.

16. Tony Fitzpatrick. BumTown (Chicago: Tia Cucha Press, 2001), 13.

17. W.P. Kinsella. Shoeless Joe (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 7.

18. Eight Men Out, director: John Sayles (MGM, 1988).

19. This scene can be found on YouTube. MovieClips, “Eight Men Out (12/12) Movie CLIP—It’s Him (1988) HD,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMxPAkZgoy0. Accessed March 6 2023.

20. Phil Alden Robinson. Field of Dreams (Universal Pictures, 1989).

21. Field of Dreams exemplifies another aspect of baseball narratives my class engages with; the feedback loop between real and fictional baseball; we all expect everyday life to appear in fiction, but in baseball narratives, fiction creeps back into real world. Even before Major League Baseball games were played in 2021 and 2022 at the newly built professional ballpark at the movie site in Dyersville, Iowa, countless fans had traveled to the place as a shrine to a game of catch, and so helped perpetuate the myth of Shoeless Joe as innocent victim and redemptive hero.

22. Professor Donohue steps up to the plate here.

23. Among the many examples of the phrase escaping baseball and entering the pop-cultural landscape include the use of “say it ain’t so, Joe” as a bridge-refrain in the 1981 song “Up All Night” by Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats, and the predictable headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when Joe Biden chose Chicago over Atlanta to host the Democratic National Convention.

24. Neither did, or at least neither originated the phrase, which is not attributed to either until the 1970s. One blogger and researcher into American vernacular English, Barry Popik, identifies the source of the quotation as Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Bob Veale, and the original version, in 1966, as “Good pitching always stops good hitting and vice-versa.” https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/good_pitching_will_always_stop_good_hitting. Accessed March 6, 2023.