Jacob Pomrenke, "Joe Jackson vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club: Never Before Seen Trial Transcript" — SportsLit S8E02
The editorial director of the Society for American Baseball Research expounds on an oft-overlooked chapter of the Black Sox Scandal... and what it tells us about the nature of "institutional scandals.
Major sports leagues seem to believe they can have their take from gambling partnerships and keep their competitive integrity too. History, of course, tends to rhyme, so it is worth diving into a later chapter of the Black Sox Scandal that reminds us about the cost of leagues looking the other way.
That was SportsLit’s motivation for engaging Jacob Pomrenke, editorial director of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), to discuss his and David J. Fletcher’s work to exhume lost nuances from the greatest game-fixing scandal in North American sports history. One hundred years ago this month, the great “Shoeless” Joe Jackson sued the Chicago White Sox over back pay. The ballclub did re-sign him for the 1920 through ’22 seasons even while there was suspicion about the 1919 World Series. Fewer than 10 living people had seen the trial transcripts before Fletcher and Pomrenke collected them in Joe Jackson vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club: Never Before Seen Trial Transcript (Eckhartz Press, May 2023).
“This trial took place in 1924, and in the 1950s, there was a court clerk in Milwaukee who was going through old files,” Pomrenke says in our conversation, which was recorded on Jan. 16. “They were going to throw out the transcript of Shoeless Joe’s lawsuit against the White Sox... they contacted the son of Shoeless Joe’s lawyer, Robert Cannon, ‘would you like this?’ The family has kept a copy of it since the 1950s, and only allowed a few researchers to see it. Coauthor David Fletcher was one of the few.
“Now that’s 100 years after the trial, we decided to make this available … it’s an incredible research resource, and we’re very proud to make that available to future researchers,” Pomrenke adds.
As a baseball nerd who is not a bona fide baseball historian, my first points of reference to the Black Sox are works of fiction I consumed around the time I was 12 years old. One is the John Sayles-directed and -written movie Eight Men Out (1988). The other was the W.P. Kinsella-penned novella Shoeless Joe, adapted into the driveller-up-the-first-base-line Field of Dreams (1989). Those have their place, but there is no substitute for the cold, hard facts.
“There were no winners in this scandal,” Pomrenke says. “There’s a famous quote from Abe Attell, the boxer involved in the scandal, that it was ‘cheaters cheating cheaters.’ And I think that’s true of a lot of institutional scandals. No one looks particularly good. But we’re better off for knowing the facts.”
Anyway, all the best to all the sports leagues and governments that believe they can lean into gambling without triggering some hellish societal side effects, for which the profiteers probably won’t pick up the tab. Having about 800 gambling messages found in a single telecast of a Toronto Raptors game surely affects impressionable children and teenagers.
As with any other vice, action needs to be taken to curb the “accessibility and cultural salience” of sports gambling, as Ben Krauss recently put it in an essay at Slow Boring. And you likely saw, in the last few days, that New England Patriots wide receiver Kayshon Boutte was arrested over illegal gambling during his college football tenure at Louisiana State — which included bets on his team, although there is no evidence he bet on negative outcomes for his team.
But hey, the leagues are confident their bottom line will not be affected. They have guidelines! For instance, with the staging of the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, members of the competing teams, Kansas City and San Francisco, are not allowed to gamble. Personnel from the other 29 NFL teams, and the Carolina Panthers, can gamble in casinos but not at the sportsbooks. So that means the upshot of the Detroit Lions’ NFC championship game collapse is seeing head coach Dan Campbell in action at the blackjack table? But I digress.
Here are some listener notes that might add more context to the chat with Jacob Pomrenke.
Intro
1:15. Why was Joe Jackson vs. Chicago American League Baseball Club contested in Milwaukee? The White Sox were incorporated in Wisconsin.
3:00. The Eight Myths Out page at SABR is well worth visiting.
5:30. Again, the eight Black Sox included five everyday players: leftfielder and cleanup batter Jackson, centrefielder Oscar (Happy) Felsch, third baseman George (Buck) Weaver, shortstop Charles (Swede) Risberg, and first baseman Arnold (Chick) Gandil. Their top two starters, Ed Cicotte and Claude (Lefty) Williams, were also in on it, and so was utility infielder Fred McMullin. It is noteworthy, in the context of our time, that Hall of Fame righty starter Urban (Red) Faber was affected by the 1918 influenza pandemic. The SABR bio of Faber notes he was “weak and underweight” and was shut down by the Sox in the final month of the ’19 campaign. He threw under half as many innings as he averaged from 1920 to ’22.
8:00. Along with José Canseco, the late Ken Caminiti was the other ballplayer whose steroid confession prompted Major League Baseball to create some doping controls. If you have not already, in 2022, Neil Acharya and I interviewed Caminiti biographer Dan Good.
As always, check sportslit.ca for our whole catalog and links to buy the books.
Interview
13:00. Jacob has an article about the 1917 Fenway Park Gamblers’ Riot on his website.
18:00. Wikipedia has an explainer article about the legal theory of “condonation.”
22:00. The point Pomrenke makes about the digitization of newspaper archives had not occurred to me. D’oh.
23:30. “Culture of gambling and the ease of opportunity.” That is where the Black Sox Scandal connects to the present day in sports. For review, the SABR bios of Hal Chase and Heinie Zimmerman are worth a peruse. Neither played in the American or National leagues after 1919.
Based on my reading, baseball gatekeepers first started finger-wagging about gambling around 1903. It was another 16 years before the big scandal.
Likewise, in more recent times, MLB warned about steroid use in 1991, but doping control was not formalized until 2005. And, the fallout from all that includes Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Álex Rodríguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Manny Ramírez being excluded from the Baseball Hall of Fame, even though complicit commissioners, general managers, and dugout managers from that era have got a plaque in Cooperstown. Odd, that.
32:45. “This was kind of a dream of Ray Cannon…” My mind was fairly blown that Jackson’s lawyer Raymond Cannon had designs on creating a players’ association, some four decades before Marvin Miller (1917-2012) accelerated the labour movement in sports.
36:45. Joe Jackson had a batting slash of .375 / .394 / .563 in the 1919 World Series, including its only home run. However, it has been noted much of his production came after Chicago had fallen behind the Cincinnati Reds in the best-of-9 series.
38:30. Pomrenke mentions late Canadian author W.P. Kinsella (1935-2016) and Shoeless Joe.
Kinsella is, “(based on) only sales figures and movie deals… arguably the most successful author Western Canada has ever produced.”1 Allow me a not-too-brief tangent. My first draft for this episode’s intro did include a part about how Kinsella’s baseball fiction and Indigenous-lensed short story collections served a great purpose at my old high school, Ernestown S.S. in Odessa, Ont., back in the day. I scrapped it since it seemed off-point and self-indulgent. But it was my first point of reference to the Black Sox.
The English department head at ESS, Pete Peart,2 related that Kinsella’s books were almost always a hit with the reluctant readers in his general-level classes. And isn’t that a goal in public education, the goal of literature, to encourage non-readers to read instead of playing video games?3 That kind of proof of concept has been cast away, it seems.
With his Indigenous-lensed stories, Kinsella, of course, was a white man taking the point of view of a Cree narrator and Cree characters. There is documentation that, at that time, both Indigenous people and treaty land inhabitants across the spectrums of reading levels understood who and what he was mocking. Kinsella was skewering our collective ignorance/amnesia about how “the colonial experience in Canada, from first contact to the present, constitutes genocide against Indigenous peoples.”4
If what he was doing was not obvious enough, Kinsella named the bumbling Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer in his stories after Jean Chrétien. Chrétien served as the Aboriginal Affairs minister under the first PM Trudeau and knew more about abuses in residential schools than he let on — without suffering electoral consequences.5
Kinsella was doing that before it was cool — or before the general populace was willing to hear it from actual Indigenous writers and filmmakers such as (but hardly limited to) Brandi Morin, Alanis Obomsawin, Jesse Thistle, or Waubgeshig Rice. Of course, attitudes change, and we evolve, and re-appraisals take place.
Good discourse and history are both messy and intersecting. Don’t even try to impose clear lines on it. And I wonder about those reluctant readers who are just left to go play video games till all hours. Okay, get back to baseball, Sager!!
43:30. Behold, the 1919 World Series footage that was found in Dawson City, Yukon, in 2014.
45:00. The quote I use about “fictions that add up to a fact” should have been attributed to David Peace, who used it to describe his novel The Damned Utd. In that novel, Peace, as you might know, put himself in the mind of the English football manager Brian Clough during his ill-fated 44-day stint helming Leeds United in 1974.
47:00. Pomrenke mentions several SABR-member authors, including William F. (Bill) Lamb and his book Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation
51:00. We need a timeline for these influential films and the Pete Rose saga.
Eight Men Out was released in U.S. and Canadian theatres in September 1988.
In early April 1989, seven months later, Sports Illustrated published a cover story about the gambling allegations against Pete Rose.
Field of Dreams was released on May 5, 1989, one month after that Rose article.
On Aug. 24, 1989, Rose voluntarily accepted placement on baseball’s ineligible list.
Eight days after that, and exactly 52 weeks after Eight Men Out’s theatrical release, Commissioner Bart Giamatti died of a heart attack.
In October 1990, Rose was in a U.S. federal prison on a tax evasion conviction while his hometown Cincinnati Reds won the World Series. Rose was incarcerated in Mansfield, Ill., which is the hometown of Ray Fosse, the all-star Cleveland catcher whom Rose trucked to score the winning run in the 1970 all-star game.
Scott Raab later wrote that coincidence was a perfect summation of being a Cleveland baseball fan: “no justice, only irony.”
53:00. “Through baseball, you can learn about anything else.” This section covers how Pomrenke got involved in SABR. He is coming up on the 20th anniversary of his first published article in a SABR publication.
57:00. I sometimes say the best announcer tandem is Jason Benetti and any analyst. Did you know about the time Benetti called three games in 23 hours? He handled two White Sox baseball broadcasts sandwiched around a 12 noon-window college football game a 2½-hours flight away from Chicago.6
Afterword
Thank you, reader-listener, for supporting SportsLit. Making podcast episodes that entail reading the entire book is a reward in itself. For now, I am keeping whatever this is at Substack. The other options (Beehiiv and Buttondown) are more for writers who are commodifying their work, and I am not yet there.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Geoff McMaster, “The troubled legacy of W.P. Kinsella,” Folio, Oct. 17, 2016.
Every so often, a teenage metalhead would ask, “Mr. Peart, are you any relation to Neil Peart from RUSH?” Peart would look him dead in the eye and say, “He’s my brother” — or half-brother, or cousin — “but we don’t really talk.” It. Worked. Every. Time.
Not that there is anything wrong with the latter.
Canadian Museum for Human Rights, “Confronting genocide in Canada.”
Better to have Liberals and New Democrats half-arsed over-governing than the Conservatives’ whole-arsed anti-governing, I say.
Anything to not have to call Big Ten West action, eh?