Joe Jackson and Pete Rose Should Be HOFers Because...

[G1911]

Originally Posted by BobC

Think about it, he didn't really double cross the fix. In his testimony from the later 1924 civil trial he said he took the money and went to tell Comiskey right AFTER the 1919 World Series had ended. So he waited till things played out and the gamblers got the result they wanted. Had he gone to Comiskey at the very beginning, he had no idea what he would say or do. For all he knew, Comiskey would have blown the whistle and stopped the series and put Williams and his family at risk from retribution by the gamblers. It seems that by waiting he may have actually been doing it to protect others, which is something that his naysayers never seem to take into consideration. Even though it seems clear that he was never directly involved with any of the gamblers himself, never meeting any of them in person apparently, he was likely made aware of the physical threats to others and had to consider that in his reaction to what was happening around him and what he would say and do as a result. In fact, given the uncertainty of knowing how the gamblers would react if their scheme was thwarted and their fix exposed, it isn't a huge stretch for Jackson to have possibly been worried that coming forth with what he knew could have potentially put his own family at risk also. So think about that, here's a guy who didn't go out and ask for any of this, and he gets stuck right in the middle of everything surrounded by a lot of complete a--holes on all sides of the situation, and he still is the only one to come forward to try and tell someone he thinks will know what the right thing to do is, all why possibly worrying that by doing so he could potentially be putting others, and his own family, at risk of physical harm. His biggest mistake from where I'm sitting was telling this all to Comiskey. Being the team's owner and literally a partner of all the other MLB owners, you would think Comiskey's having such a huge vested interest in baseball would have made him the perfect person for Jackson to go to and tell about all this. Unbeknownst to Jackson though, it turns out that Comiskey is probably the biggest a--hole of them all in this whole affair. And before anyone says that Jackson should have gone to someone else then, don't forget how player contracts were in those days. Comiskey basically owned Jackson's baseball rights for life. He couldn't have gone and have played for anyone else in the majors without Comiskey's permission.

So then to top it all off, Jackson gets screwed by Landis and the rest of MLB, who just want to make an example of him and the other Black Sox players so they can increase their control over all the players in MLB, and make themselves look good to the fans in supposedly trying to protect the integrity of the game. The MLB owners didn't care about the game's integrity though, they only cared about their pocketbooks and making sure the fans didn't stop coming to the games because they thought they were fixed. If they had really cared about the game's integrity, they would have immediately thrown Comiskey out of baseball. Jackson has to be sacrificed then because if they had made an exception for him because of his story, the focus would have likely jumped over to Comiskey and his part in all this. And that is about the only logical sense you can make out of all this. The owner's, and Landis, stuck together and protected themselves. This also goes to show how collusive and equally corrupt Landis may have been all along, going back to his involvement with the Federal League case years earlier and his seeming failure to act impartially, as was his duty, on behalf of the American public as a whole, and then the follow-up appointment a couple years later as MLB's first Commissioner, at a very lucrative salary. Of course no one would ever think of that as being some type of payoff by the MLB owners!?!?!?

The one thing that doesn't make a lot of sense though is that this info about Comiskey and what was going on eventually did come out, especially one would think when the susequent civil trial between Jackson and Comiskey took place in 1924. Yet there didn't seem to be any big uproar or questioning about it in among the fans or the public at large. Certainly nothing like the exposure and coverage the original Black Sox scandal and trial received. I guess a lot of that has to do with the lack of technology and the virtually instantaneous media coverage we have today, and the fact that back then a civil suite isn't going to have anywhere near the interest a case about the World Series would. Plus, I wouldn't have put it past MLB and the owners to use their wealth and connections to suppress, or at least control, what actually got out in the media and try to limit what and how many people heard anything, so it would all blow over as quickly as possible. Which it apparently did. So this again makes me question who really is guilty and who really is innocent in all this.

If 1) Jackson took money to throw games, which I understand he admitted to in court and 2) then played to win as his average suggests he may have and he and his supporters say he did, I would think that is double crossing the gamblers. Taking money from people to do a thing he did not then do. If he was scared of them, as was being alleged, this is quite a bold move.