TW Hit List - Joe Jackson

“Shoeless” Joe Jackson is one of the more noted figures in baseball history. But it is not mainly for his bat, but for his involvement in the 1919 World Series. This is a shame, for Williams claims for Jackson that he was the best pure hitter ever. It is not the purpose here to discuss the “BlackSox” scandal, Jackson’s alleged role, or its aftermath. However, we should say that Jackson’s numbers and achievements, even with a shortened career, easily show him to be Hall of Fame-worthy.

Just about anybody who saw Jackson play considered him in a class by himself. To some degree, he played in the shadow of Ty Cobb. In his first three seasons (1910-1912), he batted .387, .408 and .395, but Cobb won the batting title each season! (Okay, 1910 was nothing close to a full season for Jackson. As it was, Cobb and Nap Lajoie engaged in a famous batting duel that is a story in itself). Cobb was a fierce, gung-ho ballplayer who always played with all-out abandon. And oh yes, he was extremely good and hit for extremely high averages. But so did Jackson. And Jackson was graceful whereas Cobb was anything but. He was quick and strong with a perfectly fluid swing. Babe Ruth himself said he modeled his own swing after Jackson’s, “I copied Jackson's style because I thought he was the greatest hitter I had ever seen, the greatest natural hitter I ever saw. He's the guy who made me a hitter." From my reading of Williams and others, I get the impression that for a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century, Jackson was nearly forgotten about. He was nearly memory-holed. But his story just couldn’t be kept down for long. One of the greatest players ever naively mixed up in a scandal that results in his banishment from baseball and the neglect of fans for years. Williams gives a sort of apology for including him in the book despite his official status. I don’t see the need. The results speak for themselves.

Jackson finished with the third highest batting average ever at .356, behind only Cobb and Hornsby, and a career .940 OPS. He had less than half the at-bats of most the other fellows on this list, but he still finished with over 1,700 hits and nearly a thousand runs and RBI’s. He maintained a bases-on-balls to strikeout ratio of over 3:1 and struck out only once in every 26.48 at-bats, a ratio far better than anyone else on this list, even Cobb. His .408 average in 1911 is still the highest for a rookie full season and for what it’s worth, he led batters in the 1919 WS with a .375 clip. This list is about hitting, but it is known that Jackson was a superb fielder as well. He had a gifted arm, a real outfielder’s instinct, and his glove was a place “where triples go to die.” Speaking of triples, we’ll end this post with another gem of baseball lore:

In the early days of baseball, bench jockeying was prevalent and accepted. Shoeless Joe was decidedly lacking in book learning, a fact not lost on rival teams. As he stood at the plate awaiting the next delivery one hot August afternoon, a leather lung in the enemy dugout bellowed, “Can you spell illiterate?” Jackson responded with a stinging live drive and ended up in a cloud of dust on third base. Brushing himself off, he turned toward his tormentor and with a devilish grin asked, “Can you spell triple?”