The lying game

By Lyn Riddle  

OCTOBER 17, 2010 10:30 a.m. (10)

Fans of Shoeless Joe Jackson felt some consolation that his jersey, baseball glove and bat were in the Baseball Hall of Fame even if he couldn’t be named a Hall of Famer.

But last week the Hall of Fame announced what some baseball researchers already knew: the jersey is fake. The glove has been taken off display for authentication.

Hall of Fame spokesman Brad Horn said chemical testing revealed the Sox logo contained acrylic coloring, which was not used until 1941. The assertion the jersey was fake initially came from Peter Nash, a former rapper turned baseball researcher who has collected baseball memorabilia since he was a child.

“I didn’t need any chemicals to tell,” he said.

Nash said he suspected the jersey was not Jackson’s from the moment he saw it in the Hall of Fame in 1999. The museum included it as part of a display of the collection of Barry Halper, who once owned a piece of the New York Yankees. Halper sold 175 items, including the Jackson memorabilia, to Major League Baseball for $7 million. The collection was donated to the Hall of Fame.

Nash said the logo on the jersey looked too dark and didn’t match the faded collar. Also, the name Jackson stitched into the collar was bold red, not faded pink as would be expected for a garment 80 years old.

The jersey was included in a national tour of Hall of Fame memorabilia in the early 2000s and put back on display from 2005 to 2008. The bat, said to be Jackson’s famed Black Betsy, has not been displayed for a decade.

Nash kept investigating. He found out Wilson, not Spalding, manufactured the White Sox uniforms in 1919. And the uniforms that year were gray flannel, not pinstripe.

Also, Halper told two different stories about how he came to own the Jackson items.

He said he sent money to Jackson relatives in the 1980s and had someone else pick up the items and that he came to Greenville in the 1950s while a student at the University of Miami and bought the items from Katie Jackson, Jackson’s widow. Jackson died in 1951.

“The Baseball Hall of Fame has always been held in high esteem as the official guardian of baseball history,” said Arlene Marcley, founder and executive director of the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum in Greenville. “How unfortunate the Hall’s standards have been jeopardized now that we know Joe Jackson’s jersey and other items on display are fakes.”

Marcley said she knows of Greenville residents who traveled to Cooperstown, N.Y., specifically to see the Jackson items in the Hall of Fame.

Jackson, who started his baseball career in Greenville’s Textile League, was banned from baseball because of his involvement in the 1919 White Sox scandal in which team members accepted cash in return for throwing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The depth of Jackson’s involvement has been the source of much debate and research by baseball scholars, many of whom believe he deserves a place in the Hall of Fame.

Jackson played well in the series and was ultimately acquitted in a trial.

His lifetime batting average of .356 remains third highest in baseball and the story of an illiterate millworker who became known as the greatest hitter in professional baseball still resonates to the point he is the most researched player in the Hall of Fame library.

Nash said people who knew Jackson in the years he lived in Greenville after being banned from baseball knew of no jersey or glove. Also part of the Jackson collection was a 1919 Pennant gold pocket watch.

“There was a bat willed to other relatives, some documents, trophies and a watch still in family possession,” Nash said.

Besides the sale to Major League Baseball, Halper earned about $20 million auctioning other baseball memorabilia. Among the items was a diary said to be from Ty Cobb. That has been determined to be a fake. Halper died in 2005.

“The business has always been plagued with fraud and deception,” Nash said.

Even authenticators are not as ethical as they should be, he said. He’s seen authenticated items in which the player’s name in misspelled in an autograph or a picture that is clearly not the player it is claimed to be.

Marcley said she, too, has been brought pictures people believed to be Jackson and can tell immediately it is not him. “I know him when I see him,” she said.

In addition, a fellow from New York State came to the museum in 2007 with a bat he claimed could have belonged to Jackson. Marcley told him to get proof and she never heard from him again.

A document purported to have been signed by a major league player sold for $30,000 and was later found to have been signed by his manager, Nash said.

“This is a cautionary tale,” said Nash, who is writing a book about fraud in the memorabilia business and the theft of hundreds of valuable baseball-related items from the Hall of Fame, the New York Public Library and the Boston Public Library.

“It also shows in some respects people always hope something is real that ties them to baseball history. They think more with their heart than their head.”