Joe Jackson was on his way back from the golf course in Simpsonville, S.C., when he heard the news.
“I was driving home and my phone started vibrating a lot,” he said. “The first stop sign I got to, I picked it up.”
His son, also named Joe Jackson, was in the middle of a business meeting in Greenville.
“I put my phone down for like 30 minutes and picked it back up, and I had a ton of text messages,” he said.
No one warned them that their famous relative “Shoeless” Joe Jackson was about to be in the news again, so they found out through the grapevine.
The Joe Jacksons were, of course, pleasantly surprised to hear that Shoeless Joe, their great-great and great-great-great uncle, was taken off the permanently ineligible list by Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred.
“There’s a lot of disbelief,” said the elder Joseph Raymond Jackson, a country club general manager and golf pro. “I didn’t think I’d ever live to see this day happen.”
“I honestly didn’t really know what to think,” said the younger Joseph Ray Jackson, who works in business development for a construction company. “You know, my whole life I never thought I’d see it. I just kind of accepted that it was what it was.”
Now that Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and the Black Sox have been removed from MLB’s permanently ineligible list, check out the #SABR Eight Myths Out project as we set the record straight on baseball’s most notorious scandal: https://t.co/5XlOudw2bo pic.twitter.com/SHydisf4jY
— SABR (@sabr) May 13, 2025
The focus of Manfred’s decision had little to do with considering the historical plight of Jackson, the other 1919 “Black Sox” and assorted banned ballplayers from that era. This decision was all about the late Pete Rose, who passed away in September. The news filtered out after Manfred sent a letter to Rose’s attorney informing him of his decision.
“I do think this is primarily about Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame,” said Jacob Pomrenke, the director of editorial content for the Society for American Baseball Research and probably the world’s foremost scholar on the Black Sox. “That is the driver of that decision, not to get into anyone’s heads. I think in terms of the Black Sox, they’re kind of getting lumped in here. … Throwing them all in together makes for kind of a baffling decision and, you know, it remains to be seen how this is going to affect not only HOF voting, but what this means for Major League Baseball.”
Rose, Jackson and the 15 deceased others taken off the list are now eligible to be considered for enshrinement in Cooperstown.
“The National Baseball Hall of Fame has always maintained that anyone removed from baseball’s permanently ineligible list will become eligible for Hall of Fame consideration,” Hall of Fame Chairman of the Board Jane Forbes Clark said in a statement Tuesday. “Major League Baseball’s decision to remove deceased individuals from the permanently ineligible list will allow for the Hall of Fame candidacy of such individuals to now be considered. The Historical Overview Committee will develop the ballot of eight names for the Classic Baseball Era Committee – which evaluates candidates who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980 – to vote on when it meets next in December 2027.”
Pomrenke has been a bit of a myth-buster when it comes to the popular notions about the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who infamously threw the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.
Much of the public’s understanding about the story stems from Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book “Eight Men Out” and the 1988 movie starring D.B. Sweeney as Jackson. The book had factual errors, and the movie, like all movies, played with reality even more.
The truth was much more nuanced, and there has been no shortage of investigative work by the baseball community. From scouring newspapers, books, court testimony and old interviews, Pomrenke and his peers have done yeoman’s work to uncover the facts behind the scandal, instead of reprinting the legend.
Jackson, it seems, was certainly involved to some degree, likely taking some of the gamblers’ money. He certainly knew about the plan. But he also hit .375 with a homer (the only one) in the World Series with no errors. In regard to his play, he didn’t do anything to arouse suspicion that he was on the take. Jackson was eventually cleared, along with his teammates, in court in 1921, but Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis quickly banned the eight of them for life. Some fought it and Jackson was one of them who later sued the White Sox for unpaid salary.
Joe Jackson, pictured in an undated photo from his Cleveland days, made that team’s Hall of Fame, but not the real one. (Sporting News via Getty Images)
But he wasn’t some haunted soul. He left Chicago and went back home with his wife to South Carolina. By all accounts, he lived a good life until his death in 1951 at age 64.
Two years before he died, Jackson dictated an “as told to” story for Sport Magazine titled “This Is The Truth!”
“I have read now and then that I am one of the most tragic figures in baseball,” he said through the writer Furman Bisher. “Well, maybe that’s the way some people look at it, but I don’t quite see it that way myself. I guess one of the reasons I never fought my suspension any harder than I did was that I thought I had spent a pretty full life in the big leagues. I was 32 years old at the time, and I had been in the majors 13 years; I had a lifetime batting average of .356; I held the all-time throwing record for distance; and I had made pretty good salaries for those days. There wasn’t much left for me in the big leagues.”
By this point, Jackson had been banned from baseball for 28 years. He had come up for the Hall of Fame twice through a loophole — in 1936, the first year of voting, and again in 1946 — and got two votes each time. He would never make another ballot.
Jackson did make the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame in 1951 and was then set to appear on the Ed Sullivan show in an attempt to get him back in the good graces of baseball. But he died of a heart attack less than two weeks before his scheduled appearance.
Jackson played 13 seasons and collected 1,772 hits, slashing .356/.423/.517. His bWAR was 62.2. In his last season in 1920, he led the league with 20 triples and hit .382 with a 1.033 OPS. If he hadn’t been implicated in the scandal and played a few more years, he would have been a Hall of Famer that no one outside Chicago or Cleveland would remember.
“He’d be Zack Wheat or Harry Heilmann, two great players, two contemporaries and no one talks about them, no one remembers them,” Pomrenke said. “Meanwhile, Shoeless Joe is on the tips of everyone’s tongues. Any baseball fan today knows the name Shoeless Joe Jackson even if they don’t know his full story.”
Jackson’s legacy, of course, has lived on in an unusual manner that transcends his play. Because of the scandal, he became something of a legend, a mysterious character boosted by movies like “Field of Dreams” and “Eight Men Out.”
“Field of Dreams” is based on a W.P. Kinsella novel called “Shoeless Joe.” The book begins:
My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.
“He’d put on fifty pounds and the spring was gone from his step in the outfield, but he could still hit. Oh, how that man could hit. No one has ever been able to hit like Shoeless Joe.”
In the movie, he was played by Ray Liotta, who gave the character gravitas and an impish sense of humor.
You could find other mentions of Jackson and the Black Sox throughout literature. In the story “The Silver-Colored Yesterday” from Nelson Algren’s 1951 classic “Chicago: City on the Make,” the narrator, a fan of disgraced White Sox infielder Swede Risberg, says: “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.”
“I would say he’s certainly grown into this kind of mythical figure in not only baseball, but American culture,” Pomrenke said. “Field of Dreams, especially, has turned him into a ghost and what people know about him is largely through Hollywood. But, you know, the reality is he was a complicated human being. He had flaws. He was fantastic on the baseball field. But he was human, and he had flaws, and he wasn’t by any means the greatest player ever. He certainly was up there, especially with hitting.”
The White Sox cherish their past but they don’t celebrate Shoeless Joe. They don’t ignore him either; you can find him in a few pictures scattered around Rate Field. For the centennial of the 1919 World Series, they included some writing by Pomrenke in a team magazine and showed “Field of Dreams” at the ballpark. The team’s media partners haven’t been shy in talking about the story either.
But this year, as the franchise celebrates its 125th anniversary, there is a Charles Comiskey bobblehead giveaway, not a Shoeless Joe one. Will anything be different now?
Shoeless Joe Jackson did not make the graphic for the team’s giant anniversary mural at Rate Field. (Jon Greenberg / The Athletic)
“We have always respected MLB’s position vis-a-vis the 1919 players, so any past focus has generally been on the 1917 WS winning team and its collective roster,” White Sox vice president of communication Scott Reifert wrote in an email. “Too soon to say if anything will change in our organization’s approach and obviously this group won’t be considered by HOF process until Dec. 2027.”
Pomrenke was scheduled to appear on Chicago’s PBS station WTTW this week, along with an upcoming SABR webinar. He’ll keep trying to educate the public.
“It’s one of these stories that never dies,” he said. “I’ve said this over and over again, the Black Sox scandal is a cold case, not a closed case. We are continuing to learn more, news continues to happen.”
Jackson’s own story changed throughout the years, from interviews to his own testimony in two court cases.
“When it came to his involvement in the corruption of the 1919 World Series, Shoeless Joe Jackson rarely told the same story twice,” SABR researcher Bill Lamb wrote in 2019.
But family is different.
Joseph Raymond Jackson was born in 1966, 15 years after his great-great uncle had passed away, but he heard plenty about him from his parents, grandparents and his aunts and uncles, some of whom are still alive. Shoeless Joe and his wife Katie never had children, but they lived near their extended family in the Greenville area.
“He always said he did nothing wrong and that he gave his best on the field and he could live with whatever that brought,” he said.
“One of the things I tell people a lot is it was so long ago, we may never fully know everything,” son Joseph Ray Jackson said.
There’s a Shoeless Joe museum in Greenville and Joseph Raymond Jackson, who sits on the advisory board of it, credits the people involved with that, along with a variety of ex-ballplayers, managers and actors, for helping fight for Shoeless Joe’s legacy. Jackson’s memorabilia and artifacts were split up among his family and those of his late wife. These Jacksons have his 1917 World Series ring.
Joe Jackson hit .269 for the Double-A Frisco RoughRiders in 2016. (Courtesy of the Frisco RoughRiders)
While his dad was a golf pro, Joseph Ray Jackson, now 33, was a ballplayer, just like his great-great-great uncle, carrying on the family name. He even threw right and batted left, just like Shoeless Joe.
He played college ball at the Citadel and was good enough to get drafted as a catcher in the fifth round by the Texas Rangers in 2013. He got up as high as Double A with the Rangers organization before getting released at the end of spring training in 2017. He then played the season out with the Kansas City T-Bones in the independent American Association before hanging up his spikes.
During his time playing, he said would immediately get jokes about his name and people would then laugh when they found they were actually related. If you’re a baseball player named Joe Jackson, you can be sure what people are going to call you.
“I got yelled at nonstop from the stands when I was playing ball,” he said. “But in a good way, a joking way. People definitely knew my name and remembered it for that.”
Young Joe Jackson wanted to make the majors for himself, but he allowed that it would’ve been nice to “clear the family name a little bit.”
Neither of the Jacksons have been to Cooperstown and they said they’d definitely go to the induction ceremony if Shoeless Joe makes it into the Hall of Fame one day. That is likely a long shot, but they have hope.
They’re proud of their family legacy and while they don’t need the Hall of Fame’s validation, they’ll be paying attention in 2027 and beyond.
“I’ll follow it, but it will not change, for me, anything about my uncle, if it gets in or not,” Joseph Raymond Jackson said. “I’m proud of him, proud of his accomplishments on the field and actually proud of the person he was away from baseball. … It won’t change anything about how I think about him.”
(Top photo of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, center, with White Sox teammates at the 1917 World Series: Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images)