It didn't take long for the clamor for posthumously enshrining Pete Rose into the hallowed halls of Cooperstown to percolate — about five months.
But Shoeless Joe Jackson has been dead for 74 years — and still no action on his behalf.
And the villain of that piece is one of the most hated figures in sports, past or present: Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Definitely a man of his time, there was scarcely a racial or ethnic group other than his own that Landis didn't hate — with blacks (who he kept out of Major League baseball until after his death in 1944 at age 78) and Jews (Arnold Rothstein, the supreme architect of the "Black Sox Scandal" that launched Landis into baseball's commissionership, was Jewish) at the top of his hate list.
Landis was born in Millville, Ohio — which is way to the south of where Interstate 70 is today, that thoroughfare being the true cultural boundary between the Midwest and the South in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri (as proof of this, have breakfast at any diner on either side of I-70; it is almost a lock that you will receive hash browns with your bacon and eggs north of that line, but hominy grits south of it).
In his youth, the Landis family moved next door to Indiana, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan virtually ran that state until Madge Oberholtzer was kidnaped and raped in 1925 by D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the KKK in the Hoosier State. Originally sentenced to life in prison on a charge of second-degree murder because the victim had sustained a severe infection from bite marks inflicted by Stephenson, he was paroled in 1956, and died in Tennessee 10 years later at the age of 74.
And what did Shoeless Joe Jackson actually do to warrant his lifetime ban?
He merely exercised his right to remain silent (and just because the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Miranda v. Arizona was not rendered until 1966 does not mean that the right to remain silent hasn't always existed; and all eight "Black Sox" defendants, including Jackson, were acquitted at their 1921 trial) — and not for nothing, but omerta, the word borrowed from Sicilian dialect generally translated today as "code of silence," but actually means "manliness" or "masculinity" — was also the "sin" committed by Ray Lewis, who refused to rat out his friends who were allegedly responsible for the deaths of Richard Lollar (rhymes with "dollar") and Jacinth Baker, whose names combine to form the biggest answer to a trivia question this side of Patricia Meili (Lewis, by the way, was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame in 2018 — six years after he retired).
Cut from the same unimaginative cloth as his NFL counterpart, Roger Goodell (see Goodell's almost morbid obsession with having his league go to an 18-game regular-season schedule), MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is a past master of the art of waving his right index finger in the air to feel which direction the wind is blowing — so don't expect either Rose's stepping in front of the king's shadow by violating baseball's iconic Rule 21 or his cowardly attack on Bud Harrelson in the 1973 NLCS to be an issue: after all, did Juan Marichal's brutal clubbing of Johnny Roseboro keep him out of Cooperstown, although it did conjure up ugly stereotypes about the "hot Latin temper?"
And maybe it is time for MLB to revisit the rule which got Rose banned from baseball for life, in this era of FanDuel and DraftKings — along with the existence of professional sports franchises in Las Vegas.
So look for Rob Manfred to take the path of least resistance and open the gates of Cooperstown to Pete Rose — but while Manfred is at it, he should extend the same courtesy to Shoeless Joe.
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