Word: shoelessness
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Baseball purists tend to be a crazy breed. They live in the 1920s, wish they were in the Polo Grounds and wear black on the day Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox threw the World Series in 1919. Contrary to what these purists believe, baseball changes. Yet, maybe the average baseball fan could take a cue from them and learn that baseball in the 1980s would never survive without turning back to baseball at the turn of the century...
...down that textbook and pick up a piece of paper and a pencil. Try to think of Shoeless Joe, not Shakespeare. Of the Say Hey Kid, not Ho Chi Minh. Of curveballs, not bell curves...
Unfortunately for Shoeless Joe Jackson, though, this statistic is "not officially recognized" by Major League Baseball because of Joe's ever-so-tenuous connection with the Black Sox game-fixing scandal of 1919. In an Orwellian fashion hardly expected from the national pasttime of a free country, Joe was banned from the game and his name was expunged from the recond books. This was despite the overwhelming evidence supporting his claim that he always played his hardest (he led both teams with a .375 average in the 1919 Series, and his twelve hits would still stand as a Series record...
...Black Sox," as they came to be known, were hounded out of organized baseball and into the oblivion that the team owners believed they deserved. Even "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, a lifetime .356 hitter whom his contemporaries compared with Ty Cobb, is recalled today chiefly for the plea addressed to him by a disbelieving boy: "Say it ain't so, Joe." The conditions that impelled him and his teammates to take money from gamblers -- low pay, lack of security and a general feeling of involuntary servitude -- have long since been overturned. Free agency, binding arbitration and other Big Business behavior...
...young boy said to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the baseball star was implicated in the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal...