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“Shoeless” Joe Jackson 

Are there any more plaintive words in the American baseball vernacular than “Say it ain’t so, Joe”? The story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 Black Sox is the ultimate American sports fable of innocence corrupted. As the button that inspired this t-shirt suggests, long after Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis issued his fateful lifetime ban, many continued to believe that it simply wasn’t so, that the great Shoeless Joe was innocent of conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series and should therefore take his rightful place in the Baseball Hall of Fame. An argument can be made on both sides, and yet, like so much of baseball history, fact in this case is now utterly confounded with mythology. Today the yearning for Joe Jackson’s reinstatement seems not so much concerned with rehabilitating a single player’s reputation as resurrecting an entire way of life—American baseball pastoral—which much like Shoeless Joe himself was banished by forces beyond its control. 

Royalties from this officially licensed shirt are paid to the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society, which were designated as the heirs to the Jackson estate by Joe's widow Katie when she died in 1959.