Editor’s note: re-publishing this from 2018 as the Field of Dreams game unveiled their special uniforms today.
Shoeless Joe Jackson is a whole lot more than the man with the 3rd highest career batting average in Major League Baseball history and still NOT in the Hall of Fame.
You’ve read about him in books and seen him portrayed in movies such as Eight Men Out (a thorough biography of the Black Sox scandal, written by Eliot Asinof and adapted for the screen by John Sayles, Jackson was played by D.B. Sweeney) and Field of Dreams (where he was played by Ray Liotta, a movie based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella).
Also, pick up a copy of Fall from Grace, a Shoeless Joe Jackson biography by Tim Hornbaker, a must read Shoeless Joe Jackson biography that came out this spring.
Here are some of the Shoeless Joe Jackson fun facts and anecdotes that were covered in the podcast:
-Spent his whole life married to the same woman, and when they tied the not when she was just 15 years old. During the off-seasons he moonlighted as a vaudeville actor, and one spring training he held out of camp, and almost quite baseball in his prime, to focus on acting.
-She almost left him when he mysteriously went AWOL for awhile in Atlanta with a vaudeville actress. Very little is known about what actually happened when he disappeared.
-Avoided WWI draft by joining a warship painting company. then starred in a ship building league while still in the prime of his MLB career.