Baseball Records

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In your April 14th baseball quiz, you refered to Joe Jackson's lifetime batting average. Of course, this is a remarkable achievement that the entire sport should be proud of.

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) and even attempted to notify his team's owner, Charles A. Comiskey, that some of his teammates were planning to throw the World Series. In fact, it may even be his honesty and love for the game that Comiskey--who himself has been suspected of being a party to a fix--took exception to, and eventually led to the early termination of Joe's career.

The Crimson has sidestepped official league policy in acknowledging talent of this "unperson." The next step is to fight to have history reinstated so as to coincide with truth. Jim Golen '89