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Perhaps the twelve working­class men from the Second City identified too closely with those they had been asked to judge. Despite several confessions of guilt, the players were acquitted. On August 2, after the jury deliberated for less than three hours, the trial came to a close. Image by Bain News Service, 1917 Library of Congress Everyone wanted to know: Would the athletes be convicted? Might they even go to jail? Young boys crowded the bleacher-style seating that had been brought into the courtroom and, as the New York Times reported, watched in awe. Sweat ran down the players’ starched collars. For weeks, the city sweltered in the heat as the proceedings unfolded. With their indictment, the possibly apocryphal phrase “Say it ain’t so, Joe” had entered the vernacular. In what the press dubbed the Black Sox Scandal, Jackson and seven other White Sox players were accused of conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. In summer 1921, with what should have been years of professional play ahead of him, Shoeless Joe found himself in the Cook County Criminal Court Building, a seven-storey Romanesque landmark in downtown Chicago. He could fire a line drive to any corner in the park, the ball slicing through the air straight as the contrail of a plane. Those who watched him in person considered him one of the game’s best natural hitters. That’s how he became, as he remained, Shoeless Joe. He simply peeled them off, and, despite the heckling fans, he played the rest of the game in his stocking feet.

He picked up his nickname early in his career, when a pair of new cleats were giving him blisters. He never really learned how to read or write, but he transcended his impoverished beginnings to become one of the most celebrated figures in the sport. Joseph Jackson was born on July 16, 1887, in rural South Carolina. And when the farmer finishes, “he” does come: Shoeless Joe Jackson. He works hard to get the park just right. One day an Iowa farmer hears a supernatural voice: “If you build it, he will come.” The farmer knows it’s crazy to turn under part of his cornfield to build a baseball diamond. Like most viewers, I adored the story’s healing arc. I first encountered the magic of Field of Dreams as a teenager, when I saw the 1989 film with Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones.