The Chris Moeller Archives

The Screw Joe Jackson Game

Sorry for the continued hiatus. On the occasion, however, of the "Field of Dreams" spectacle tonight in my home state of Iowa, here's a re-post of my initial thoughts when this promotional event was announced two years ago. We would have all been better off had it been skipped due to Covid-19, like it was last year. Having the Evil Empire come out to the sticks from New York, taking on the White Sox and helping Major League Baseball to cash in on what was Shoeless Joe's profound grief while he was alive, makes it all the worse somehow. 

Thursday, August 08, 2019 

A Field of Dreams without Shoeless Joe 

In 1989’s classic movie Field of Dreams, set and filmed here in Iowa, ghost baseball players walk out from a cornfield outfield onto the soft grass of a baseball diamond that has been carved out-- complete with pitcher's mound and backstop-- by novice farmer Ray Kinsella. The ghost players are spiritual tourists that had once been the eight Chicago White Sox players banned for life by major league commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis in 1921 for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series to Cincinnati. When the ghost of the best of these players, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, asks Kinsella about the floodlights that are illuminating the field, the fantasist farmer explains that team owners had subsequently discovered-- about one score after 1919-- that they could make more money by installing lights and playing the games at night. Jackson replies, dismissively, “Owners.” 

Today comes word that Major League Baseball, the Chicago White Sox, and the New York Yankees, are planning for the two teams to meet on the new “Field of Dreams” at the film site in Dyersville, Iowa next summer for a game that will count as much as any of the others in the American League standings. I don’t wish to make too much of my opposition to the game except to say that I think it’s another symptom of the spiritual death of America. 

The long and the short of it, and the reason for my expressed angst, is that this game is really a thoughtless money grab that ignores the actual legacy and meaning of something important. This ballfield was created first, back in the '70s, in someone’s mind-- that of a short story author from Canada named Bill Kinsella, at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City. (He died in 2016.) It was a story that tied the unforgiven “Black Sox" to something more spiritual than the game they played, beyond life and death, something nearing religious for a few of us. If it wasn't a personal story to Kinsella too, he wouldn't have gifted his last name to his main protagonist. 

The point of the plot-- which excited Iowans seem to be forgetting today-- is that these players were no longer welcome in Major League Baseball. That's why they came here-- to Iowa. They received lifetime bans-- ones that have since been extended from “lifetime” to “eternal.” This field belongs to those men. Ray built it for them. He told us so in the movie. It’s their refuge. It’s unsanctioned space, a thing separate. It’s the prison yard of the correctional facility of their banishments even after death. Since they wouldn’t be allowed to suit up in a major league game at a major league park in 2020, I’m utterly unconvinced as to why Major League Baseball should be permitted on theirs. With the Field of Dreams, Iowans think they have a tourist attraction that's even capable of bringing Major League Baseball to town. They actually have something even better than that. Something not everyone is even capable of seeing. Something... sorry, heavenly. 

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, conversely, is a man completely overwhelmed of the civic responsibility he holds. He has zero imagination, no discernible depth to his being. He’s a baseball commissioner who pursued that job because it's a good job to have. It's clearly not because he likes baseball. He doesn't. I'll never forget watching his first game on the job in 2015, opening night, Cardinals and Cubs in St. Louis. He tells ESPN's TV crew that Busch Stadium is lovely. He's never been there... So he's been Commissioner Selig's top financial officer for two decades, the second most powerful man in the sport, and this Busch Stadium, opened in 2006, has on this night already hosted multiple games in each of three different World Series, five different League Championship Series, and an All-Star Game. And he's never been there. Now that's a fan for you. If you were privileged to be the CFO of Major League Baseball, with all the salary and perks that that position entailed, how many games would you attend? 

Manfred thinks the games are too long and boring. We only hear from him when he dreams up another idea he thinks will make it less boring. I'm waiting for the alligator pit in center field. He thinks its pace is out of step with the modern world-- and you know what? He’s right about that one. But he’s too woefully ignorant of the history of the league he oversees to know that critics have been saying that since the beginning of professional ball-- during Reconstruction. Baseball stands still as a tower-- a staggeringly profitable tower-- because it is out of step with the conventions of time and with our modern era, not despite of it. It is pastural in an increasingly-urban nation, unhurried in a frenetic one. It was an anachronism from the moment it was birthed. 

In Dyersville, you’ve got a new temporary “stadium” being erected, one that will seat better than 8,000 fans for this contest, and presumably one that looks nothing like the one in the film-- or in the book that inspired the film: “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa.” In the details of those media, the grandstand was a much more modest thing. It amounted to a single set of bleachers. The disembodied and inexplicable voice in the cornfield told the fictional Ray, “If you build it, they will come.” Now a new one is going up that has more bells and whistles. He built it, they’re going across the road. 

By tracking mud across Joe Jackson's home turf here, Manfred is showing us testicles that are each the size of a Homer Bailey hanging slider, belt-high. When he took over the league's top job in '15, he turned down a reinstatement appeal on behalf of Jackson from the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library. That's located in the former slugger’s hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Jackson, in case you don’t possess all the historic particulars about him, always proclaimed his innocence in the scandal. He was lumped in with the seven other men who “fixed” the series-- who were all acquitted of the crime in a court of law, incidentally, and who each claimed that Jackson was not involved. 1919 saw Shoeless Joe break the record at the time for most hits lashed out in a single World Series, and he played error-free at his position in right field. (He was also illiterate, and signed his lifetime ban with an “X” because he couldn’t write his name. He could have used a lawyer.) 

What will make you laugh is Manfred’s stated reasoning behind extending a then-approaching century-long banishment for Jackson, who has also been dead longer than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He wrote back to the museum that he was moving forward behind the logic of another dead commissioner, Bart Giamatti, from the 1980s: “The Jackson case is now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a modern-day review with an eye to reinstatement.” Hmm. In other words, we can’t now review the case because it’s been too long. Manfred's is not the place to question the wisdom of the commissioners that came before him, some of them fans of the sport. 

Joe Jackson is no longer a man in the eyes of Major League Baseball. He’s a formless, tragic character from the long ago past. They think nothing of profiting off what they think you remember about him-- which is as one of the men who was chased away for the sake of the “integrity” of the game-- when there were actually many more than just eight villains. Every World Series outcome prior to 1919, back to the first in 1903, has to be considered suspect because of the prevalence of gamblers surrounding the sport at the time. Club owners winked at it-- and may have been on the take as well, in some cases-- until it blew up so big as to threaten its standing with the paying public. By scapegoating Jackson, Gandil, Weaver, Schalk, Cicotte, Williams, Risberg, and McMullin, a first-ever "commissioner" in 1921 was able to assure Americans that their national pastime-- actually a big business masquerading as a game-- was what it always claimed to be, but rarely had been. It’s a re-costuming ten decades later as Manfred, Chicago club owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and New York’s Son of Steinbrenner appeal to your heartstrings again by heading to the heart of the heartland. 

The movie did its fair share to misrepresent history in 1989, but its immense heart was in the right place. One of the inaccuracies of the film is that Shoeless Joe didn’t like his contemporary Detroit opponent, Ty Cobb. On screen, Ray Liotta’s “Joe” remarks that Cobb wasn’t invited to suit up with the other dead players on the mythical field because, colorfully, “none of us could stand the son of a bitch while he was alive so we told him to stick it.” And documentary filmmaker Ken Burns did his part to misrepresent the actual truth about Cobb in 1994’s Baseball series on PBS, but Burns also chronicled the story of Cobb poignantly traveling from Georgia to Greenville to see Jackson late in each of their lives. He found the long-banished player working at a liquor store he owned. He bought something from Jackson and said at the counter, “Don’t you remember me, Joe?” Joe replied, “Sure I remember you, Ty. I just didn’t think you or any of the guys would want to remember me.” That was the price he was still paying-- the enduring representative of the castaway player-- and throwaway person, the fallen idol, the cautionary example for every professional athlete that would ever follow. 

This is a battle between Major League Baseball and its own ghosts. A battle that continues very much today since MLB would still have you believe that the “integrity” of their competition is only seeded in the ethics of the players, and never with the often-conspiring owners. It's also about the aims of Major League Baseball to try to own everything connected with the sport, to ultimately trademark it all. It's still a mystery to me as to how the corporate entity of Major League Baseball can dictate that Shoeless Joe Jackson, or any person, for that matter, is ineligible for enshrinement in the NATIONAL BASEBALL Hall of Fame. But that's where we are and have always been. This is one more way to kick Joe Jackson, to monetize the misery this league inflicted on him. I like to think that if he were around today to ask, or if you were chanced to encounter his ghost here in Iowa, he'd tell them to stick it.

posted by CM @ 6:54 PM