I received an e-mail yesterday from a regular reader (hint, receiving e-mail from readers makes me very happy; I prefer messages that don’t begin with "You’re an idiot, and here’s why" but hey, I’ll take what I can get) about my musings on Shoeless Joe Jackson. I’m the first to admit that I really don’t know much about the Black Sox scandal other than how it was portrayed in the movie Eight Men Out. But I’d like to learn more, because it was a defining moment in what has become, more or less, my religion.

To that end, I read, as this reader suggested, a thread over on rsb that shed some light on the details surrounding the scandal and Jackson’s involement in it. Also, from that thread, I found two other sites that have good information: Shoeless Joe Jackson’s Virtual Hall of Fame and Real Legends. If you’re interested, I encourage you to visit these sites. The study of history frequently is not painless but it is always germane.

The only conclusion I’m willing to reach from what I’ve read is that there were a lot of bad people involved in the scandal, and it’s not clear that Jackson and Buck Weaver were among them. In Jackson’s case, it seems like he just wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and made some poor decisions. Ignorance doesn’t absolve him of responsibility, but it does cast him in a somewhat different light than someone like Pete Rose, who quite clearly knew what he was doing.

As for Weaver, his mistake was in not blowing the whistle. My personal opinion is that the punishment levied against him outweighed what was appropriate for the crime but that, given the historical context, it made sense at the time. Weaver and his teammates were being set forth as examples of what would happen to those who associate with gamblers with the intent to affect the outcome of games and thereby tarnish the integrity of the sport. It’s an understandable reaction to a situation that had gotten way out of control.

The damning thing is that, thanks in large part to the owners (well, Charles Comiskey, at the very least–and if things were at all like they are today, he probably wasn’t alone), the players were forced, or at least felt as though they were forced, to accept money from shady individuals. Again, this doesn’t absolve the players of responsibility. But there is a difference between a person who robs banks to support their drug habit and one who picks pockets to buy food for their family. In this day and age it’s hard to sympathize with big-league ballplayers and the money they make. But if you go to minor-league games, you see guys who are out there struggling to make ends meet doing a job that, while considered by many (myself included) to be living out a dream, has a very short lifespan, takes a tremendous toll on the body, and generally doesn’t provide (m)any useful skills for future employment. Yeah, baseball is great. But for the vast majority who claim it as a profession, it’s no walk in the park.

Anyway, my point with all this is that the whole scandal was a real shame. It’s easy to understand why it happened, and we can hope that something like it never occurs again. As a working stiff, I am sympathetic to people who are trying their darndest to provide for their families. But as a member of a society that holds (or should hold) its members responsible for their actions, I appreciate the need for some form of punishment. Should Jackson and, even moreso, Weaver still be banned from baseball? It’s a question of principle at this point, of course, but one worthy of consideration. A part of me would like to see them brought back into the fold, particularly Weaver. But another part of me realizes that these men are dead, and in a real sense it is irrelevant how we publicly choose to honor them (or not). If for no other reason than to keep Rose and his sympathists at bay, I’m finding myself increasingly on the side of keeping their bans intact and instead just remembering them well, as average guys who stumbled into a difficult situation, made questionable (at best) decisions, and paid dearly for it.

Whatever the case, no matter how hard I look at this, and from how many angles, as a baseball fan, the whole affair does and always will break my heart.