Regardless of his lifestyle, gambling, a question to ask is why now.

Was it because he died, or, is because major league sports are now forever linked to gambling for revenue, same for the NFL, Pro Soccer, NBA.

You can't escape FanDuel or other online gambling sources in the parks or watching televised games. Gambling is big time money for the leagues.

Interesting read on Gambling and Pro Sports...

Link Baseball’s Gambling Hypocrisy

Even the internet knows it's about revenue,

https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/st.../1922706322870436336

Black Sox Scandal

After the White Sox lost the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, Jackson and seven other White Sox players were accused of accepting $5,000 each (equivalent to $91,000 in 2024) to throw the Series. In September 1920, a grand jury was convened to investigate the allegations.

Jackson's 12 base hits set a Series record that was not broken until 1964, and he led both teams with a .375 batting average (.286 in the games the White Sox lost and .545 in the games they won). He committed no charged errors and threw out a runner at the plate. However, the Reds hit an unusually large number of triples, three out of nine total, to Jackson's position in left field. The Sox pitchers said the team's outfielders were playing out of position and slowly fielding balls.

It was alleged that Jackson admitted to participating in the fix during grand jury testimony on September 28, 1920.

In 1921, a Chicago jury acquitted Jackson and his seven teammates of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, Kenesaw Mountain Landis [Link], the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, imposed a lifetime ban on all eight players. "Regardless of the verdict of juries," Landis declared, "no player that throws a ballgame; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ballgame; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball." [Landis became his own judge, jury and executioner.]

After the grand jury returned its indictments, Charley Owens of the Chicago Daily News wrote a regretful tribute headlined, "Say it ain't so, Joe." The phrase became legendary when another reporter later erroneously attributed it to a child outside the courthouse:

When Jackson left the criminal court building in the custody of a sheriff after telling his story to the grand jury, he found several hundred youngsters, aged from 6 to 16, waiting for a glimpse of their idol. One child stepped up to the outfielder, and, grabbing his coat sleeve, said:
"It ain't true, is it, Joe?"
"Yes, kid, I'm afraid it is," Jackson replied. The boys opened a path for the ball player and stood in silence until he passed out of sight.
"Well, I'd never have thought it," sighed the lad.

In an interview in Sport nearly three decades later, Jackson confirmed that the legendary exchange never occurred.

Dispute over Jackson's guilt

Jackson's involvement in the scandal remains controversial to this day. He reportedly refused the $5,000 bribe twice—even though it would effectively double his salary—only to have teammate Lefty Williams toss the cash on the floor of his hotel room. Jackson then tried to tell White Sox owner Charles Comiskey about the fix. Still, Comiskey refused to meet with him. Unable to afford legal counsel, Jackson was represented by team attorney Alfred Austrian—a clear conflict of interest. Before Jackson's grand jury testimony, Austrian allegedly elicited Jackson's admission of his supposed role in the fix by plying him with whiskey. Austrian also persuaded the nearly illiterate Jackson to sign a waiver of immunity from prosecution.

Years later, the other seven players implicated in the scandal confirmed that Jackson was never at any meetings. Williams said they only mentioned Jackson's name to give their plot more credibility, although he did not say why Jackson would have been paid $5,000 had that been the case. Jackson's performance during the series itself lends further credence to his assertions, although the game records show that he hit far better during the "clean" games than those thrown. A 1993 article in The American Statistician reported the results of a statistical analysis of Jackson's contribution during the 1919 World Series and concluded that there was "substantial support to Jackson's subsequent claims of innocence".

An article in the September 2009 issue of Chicago Lawyer magazine argued that Eliot Asinof's 1963 book Eight Men Out, purporting to confirm Jackson's guilt, was based on inaccurate information. For example, Jackson never confessed to throwing the series as Asinof claimed. Further, Asinof omitted key facts from publicly available documents, such as the 1920 grand jury records and proceedings of Jackson's successful 1924 lawsuit against Comiskey to recover back pay for the 1920 and 1921 seasons. Asinof's use of fictional characters within a supposedly non-fiction account also damaged the book's historical accuracy.

In 1989, MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti declined to reinstate Jackson because the case was "now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a present-day review with an eye to reinstatement." In November 1999, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution lauding Jackson's sporting achievements and encouraging MLB to rescind his ineligibility. The resolution was symbolic since the U.S. government had no jurisdiction in the matter, and Jackson died in 1951, some 48 years earlier. Commissioner Bud Selig stated that Jackson's case was under review, but no decision was issued during Selig's tenure. In 2015, the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum formally petitioned Commissioner Rob Manfred for reinstatement, on grounds that Jackson had "more than served his sentence" in the 95 years since his banishment by Landis. Manfred denied the request after an official review, writing: "The results of this work demonstrate to me that it is not possible now, over 95 years since those events took place and were considered by Commissioner Landis, to be certain enough of the truth to overrule Commissioner Landis' determinations".

In 2020, ESPN reported that MLB had shifted its policy and that the league "has no hold on banned players after they die because the ineligible list bars players from privileges that include a job with a major league club." It is unclear how that might affect Jackson's Hall of Fame prospects.

On May 13, 2025, Manfred announced that MLB had changed its policy such that all players were removed from the permanently ineligible list upon death. With this decision, Jackson was once more eligible for the Hall of Fame. Jackson, along with other reinstated players, will be eligible for consideration by the Hall of Fame's Classic Baseball Era Committee in 2027.

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