For Some Players, Not Reaching the Hall Just Brings More Fame

Shoeless Joe Jackson was, by any measure, the top contributor for the Chicago White Sox in the World Series 100 years ago. With his trademark coiled swing, he tallied a dozen hits and Chicago’s lone home run in a five-games-to-three loss to the Cincinnati Reds that October.
Two years later he was barred from the league along with seven other White Sox players accused of accepting money from gamblers to throw that 1919 Series. M.L.B. expelled the so-called Black Sox in 1921, and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis placed the players on an ineligible list, forbidding their association with professional baseball.
But far from being expunged from public memory, Jackson’s name has endured beyond those of nearly all his peers. He has been evoked in a Broadway musical and movies like “Field of Dreams.” A museum dedicated to his life stands in his hometown.
Jackson will almost certainly never be welcomed to the Hall of Fame, which will add six new members this weekend, but he stands nonetheless as an early example of an increasingly prominent baseball-historical archetype: the player all the more well-known for institutional efforts not to remember him.