Shoeless Joe Jackson, Hall of Famer
From L.A. Observed:


Monrovia's one-of-a-kind Baseball Reliquary is "dedicated to fostering an appreciation of American art and culture through the context of baseball history." Its version of the Hall of Fame is the Shrine of the Eternals, which honors figures deemed important for more than their playing stats. Newly nominated this year are former Dodgers Don Zimmer...Roger Craig and Mudcat Grant and ex-Angel Doug Rader ("baseball's ultimate prankster"). Also on the ballot are notables such as Billy Buckner, Yogi Berra, Casey Stengel, Ted Giannoulas (in the San Diego phone book as simply "Chicken, The") and Helen Callaghan (immortalized in the film A League of Their Own). Winners will be announced in May. Past inductees are listed below:

The eighteen individuals previously elected to the Shrine of the Eternals are, in alphabetical order: Jim Abbott, Dick Allen, Moe Berg, Ila Borders, Jim Bouton, Roberto Clemente, Dock Ellis, Mark Fidrych, Curt Flood, William "Dummy" Hoy, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Marvin Miller, Minnie Minoso, Satchel Paige, Jimmy Piersall, Pam Postema, and Bill Veeck, Jr.

The Baseball Reliquary is the group that gives the Hilda Award, named for Hilda Chester, a Brooklyn fan who started the tradition of ringing a cowbell at Dodgers games.



Let's take one of these people. Shoeless Joe Jackson was inducted into the Shrine of the Eternals in 2002. Here are some of the highlights of his induction:


In introducing the first of the 2002 inductees, Terry Cannon observed..."[If I may speak for those members who voted for him, whether or not they felt he was party to the fixing of the 1919 World Series, I believe that they feel that Shoeless Joe Jackson has been punished long enough. And now, some 50 years after his passing, the time has come to lift the ban so that Shoeless Joe can take his place beside the other immortals in the Baseball Hall of Fame. And today, the Baseball Reliquary is indeed proud to have Shoeless Joe Jackson enter its Shrine of the Eternals."

Accepting the induction of Joe Jackson on behalf of his family and the Shoeless Joe Jackson Society was Mike Nola....Nola is one of the foremost authorities on Joe Jackson, having spent the last 17 years researching his life. He became actively involved in the movement to exonerate Jackson when he joined the Shoeless Joe Jackson Society in 1990. He developed and currently maintains the Society’s official Web site, which is called the Shoeless Joe Jackson Virtual Hall of Fame (www.blackbetsy.com)....

Nola’s most impassioned comments related to Jackson’s implication in the 1919 Black Sox scandal: "I’m here to tell you through all my research, there’s no way Joe Jackson had anything to do with the throwing of any games in the 1919 World Series. He batted .375; he had 12 hits, which was a World Series record; he made five runs; he batted in six. Joe accounted for 11 of the 20 runs that the Sox scored. He had the only home run. He played errorless ball. So those are not the statistics of a man trying to throw any games, in my opinion.

"Now I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that Joe was a saint. I’ve never subscribed to the Saint Joe theory. Joe knew about the fix, he knew that something was going on. But, on the other hand, so did Ray Schalk and Eddie Collins. Charles Comiskey knew about the fix after the first game. He went to the National Commission and tried to tell them what he knew. That is one of my arguments. What makes anyone in their right mind think that if the National Commission didn’t believe Charles Comiskey, one of the most respected men in baseball at the time, that they would have believed the bumpkin from South Carolina had Joe Jackson come forward? They wouldn’t have done it. They would have laughed him out of baseball and the gamblers would have killed him."

Nola then addressed the issue of the $5000 that Jackson supposedly received for his involvement in the fix: "A lot of people say Joe received $5000. He didn’t receive $5000. The $5000 was left in his room by his teammate Lefty Williams when Joe wasn’t even present. Joe found the money when he came back to his room. He tried to give it back to Comiskey. We’ve got four letters where Joe tries to go to Comiskey over the winter of 1919-1920 to tell what he knows. All he wanted was Comiskey to pay his train fare. Comiskey was a cheapskate, to say the least. He did not pay his train fare because Comiskey was trying to cover up the fix to protect his investment in his players."

Nola also stressed that, despite press accounts saying that he was a bitter and depressed man after his banishment from baseball, Jackson was "more successful outside of baseball than he was in baseball." Jackson ran a number of successful businesses in both Savannah, Georgia and Greenville, South Carolina, including a dry cleaning business, a barbecue restaurant, and a liquor store....



Nola's website includes another example of a Hollywood celebrity spouting his opinions. Unlike Richard Gere, however, Kevin Costner addressed his comments to a group of people who cared about them.


Kevin Costner...believes that disgraced Chicago White Sox star Shoeless Joe Jackson should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Costner was on hand Wednesday at the DVD release party for the 15th anniversary edition of "Field of Dreams." Universal Studios dressed a West Hollywood baseball field with corn stalks and bleachers and projected the film on an outdoor screen for a crowd that included Costner's co-stars Amy Madigan and Timothy Busfield....

The movie follows Costner's character as he builds a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield to attract Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was banned for life after his team was found to have thrown the 1919 World Series.

Jackson's teammates were found to have taken money from gamblers to purposely lose the series. Jackson knew about the scheme, but said he refused the money and actually played some of the best games of his career during the series.

"It's amazing the people we've managed to forgive in this country and those that we don't seem to be able to forgive," Costner said. "He seemed like a fairly simple man."

Costner said that baseball cannot tolerate gambling because "it absolutely destroys the integrity of the game.

"But I think wise people sitting in a room with a certain amount of humility, a certain amount of compassion, I think a lot of us would like to see Shoeless Joe Jackson in the Hall of Fame."...



Ted Williams was not cold when thinking about Shoeless Joe Jackson; when Ted established his Hitters Hall of Fame, Joe Jackson was one of the original inductees. (In case you're wondering why Williams would give John Glenn a Lifetime Achievement Award, it turns out that the two served together in Korea during one of Ted's military stints.)

Contrast Jackson's story with that of Jean Joseph Octave (Chauncey) Dubuc:


A nine-year career that began with 5-6 and 3-5 seasons with the Cincinnati Redlegs in 1908 and 1909 didn’t truly take shape until Dubuc returned to the majors in 1912 and had the first of two 17-win seasons with the Detroit Tigers. In fact, Dubuc won no fewer than 10 games in each of his five years with Detroit.

But it wasn’t until Dubuc landed in Boston for the 1918 season that he secured a title that lasted 86 years: a member of the last Red Sox team [until 2004] to win a World Series championship....

The only blemish on his otherwise solid career was his alleged role in the fixing of the 1919 World Series.

It was a minimal part, to be sure. According to The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Giants first baseman Hal Chase reportedly enlisted Dubuc and Heinie Zimmerman to approach their Giants teammates to see who was interested in earning a little money on the side by betting on the rigged World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds. Dubuc was accused of having “guilty knowledge” of the alleged fix and, while appearing before a grand jury in October 1920, produced a telegram from former major league pitcher and gambler Bill Burns stating that the series was fixed.

But while eight players, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, were banned for life for their role in the scandal, Dubuc would soon begin the second chapter in his baseball life....

Dubuc embarked on a managerial career that took him to Toledo, Syracuse, Ottawa and Manchester, N.H., where he led the Blue Sox to the New England League pennant in 1926.

In 1929 Dubuc rejoined the Tigers organization and spent three seasons as a coach, and was credited with signing a number of talented ballplayers, including Hall of Fame first baseman Hank Greenberg and another Nashua resident - catcher George “Birdie” Tebbetts.

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