You've seen this man before. This fellow in the black-and-white photograph the size of a baseball card. But this is not how you saw him. You saw him betraying a nation's faith, maybe walking out of a courtroom with a sad little kid hanging from his coat sleeve pleading with him to deny the awful corruption. Or maybe you saw him as a ghost in an antique baseball uniform stepping out of an Iowa corn field.

This fellow in the snapshot is from another place, a pleasant balding man with big features who seems to have not a trouble in the world.

There he sits in a lawn chair outside his home in Greenville, S.C., wearing slacks, white shirt, leather shoes, his left foot crossed to his right knee, his broad-brimmed white hat tossed casually on the lawn beside him. His face is lifted to us, gazing to the right past the camera and squinting. It's as if he's sizing up an opposing pitcher. But Ty Cobb once observed that "Shoeless" Joe Jackson didn't study pitchers. He just swung. As natural, level and dangerous a swing as Cobb or anyone in the majors ever saw.

It's something you have to imagine: "Shoeless" Joe innocent of all the mythology and melodrama, innocent of scandal. Lester Erwin can do that. This is the picture he carries in his head, the same one he keeps in an album.

"This is the way I remember Joe, right here. In the front yard, in the lawn chair," says Erwin, 51.

He was 5 years old when Jackson died, but he says it's true, he can remember the man sitting in that spot outside the brick bungalow on East Wilburn Street. Jackson lived there during the last years of his life with his wife, Kate. She and Erwin's mother were cousins. In summers Erwin and his family would visit and little Lester would wander off into the room where Jackson kept his mementos and trophies and an old hickory baseball bat, bumpy from wear, wrapped at the handle with black tape and stained brown. Stained brown with tobacco juice, or so the story goes.

The little boy knew this gentle man named Joe had once played major league baseball. Years later he would learn that as left fielder for the Chicago White Sox, Jackson was banned from baseball because he was mixed up in a scheme by gamblers and ballplayers to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. He'd have to wonder if he'd seen the man, or that photograph, in the right light.

Nostalgia clashes with harsh baseball history in Greenville, where, in a City Hall ceremony, July was declared "Shoeless" Joe Jackson Month. "Greenville's Goin' Shoeless" the posters and bumper stickers said. Jackson was raised, learned to play ball and died here at 63 in 1951. It's not hard to find folks around town who can tell the "Joe Jackson I knew" stories.

Years after he became a national emblem of the most heinous scandal in baseball history, Jackson settled into a quiet life running a liquor store in West Greenville. He didn't talk much about the 1919 mess. And if he was bitter about the game, he never showed it. The fact is he couldn't stay away from baseball. In exile from the majors, he played for traveling teams, picking up a few bucks here and there. When that ended and he came home to Greenville, you could often find him on the local sandlot playing with the kids. He loved kids, though he had none of his own.

"He'd roll his sleeves up, but never took his hat off," says John Burgess, 58, who as a boy delivered the evening paper to the Jackson home. "He'd pitch for both sides. He'd give us instructions. ... Never hollered at anybody. He was very encouraging."

Fond memories nurture endless hopes for one man's professional redemption.

Erwin felt strongly enough to lead a campaign in 1983 to put Jackson's name on a 7,000-seat ball park going up in the southeast end of Greenville. He and troops of volunteers got thousands of petition signatures, wrote to members of the state legislature and Congress. It didn't work. The mayor and city council decided instead on Greenville Municipal Stadium, now home to an Atlanta Braves minor league team.

"It was a disappointment. We put a lot of work into it," says Erwin, a district circulation manager for the morning paper, Greenville News. The Shoeless Joe Jackson Society, founded to pursue the stadium campaign, went dormant. The society and Erwin's name are listed still on one of several Joe Jackson Web sites.

Since the stadium campaign, other groups have succeeded in putting Jackson's name on a stretch of local highway. And the old Brandon Mill field Jackson played on was rebuilt and dedicated in 1996 as the Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial Ballpark. He has been enshrined in the Greater Greenville Baseball Hall of Fame. In honor of his six years playing major league ball in Cleveland, he's got a spot in that city's Baseball Hall of Fame.

But not Cooperstown. The National Baseball Hall of Fame has a pair of his spikes on display as part of an exhibit on the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal. But among the bronze plaques in the gallery of members you won't find the name Joseph Jefferson Wofford Jackson, one of the greatest hitters baseball has known. As long as his name is on Major League Baseball's "ineligible" list, he cannot be considered for election to the Hall of Fame.

This winter the hot-stove league crackled with news. A petition had been filed with Major League Baseball arguing for Jackson's reinstatement. Such efforts had been made before, but this was different. Look who's filing the petition: Former Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, one of the top-10 hitters of all time, and former Cleveland pitcher Bob Feller.

And so the argument flared again. When the baseball world's attention shifted to the induction ceremonies in Cooperstown last weekend, it was just another reminder to Jackson advocates in Greenville and elsewhere of glory denied. And there are lots of these people, running Jackson Web sites and newsletters. Blowing in the embers, you might say.

What is it about Jackson? Eight players were ousted in the scandal, but who besides a baseball history buff can name another one of them? You don't hear about the ringleaders in the "fix," first baseman Arnold "Chick" Gandil, pitcher Eddie Cicotte, shortstop Charles "Swede" Risberg. You hear about "Shoeless" Joe, who never met with the gamblers, who attended one meeting of players where the scheme was discussed.

It's Jackson who inspires the name of a character in "Damn Yankees," a different "Shoeless" Joe, a fellow from Hannibal, Mo. Jackson, of course, wasn't from Hannibal. His ghost also never walked out of an Iowa cornfield as in "Shoeless Joe," the book that became the movie "Field of Dreams." And a sad little kid never said, "Say it ain't so, Joe," either. As for this shoeless business, Jackson went sock-footed for part of one minor league game - one game - because his new spikes were killing his feet. And some fan supposedly yelled "You shoeless S.O.B.!" That was it.

Put the colorful nickname and the deeds together and you get the stuff of legend, something on the order of Paul Bunyan. The poor Southern mill hand who could not read or write but could hit a baseball like a being from another planet. Line drives to rip the glove off a fielder's hand. Blue darters, they called them. His .356 batting average after 13 seasons makes him the third-best hitter baseball history.

Jackson becomes the embodiment of the tragedy, the face of a national disgrace. The small-town kid with monstrous talent goes to the big city up North. Was he fatally corrupted? Bamboozled by city slickers? Betrayed by a pal? However you look at it, it's a myth waiting to happen. He's 32 years old when he gets kicked out of the majors, just as the new juiced-up baseball is coming in. His brilliant career cut short, his Hall of Fame honors denied, Jackson haunts the game like a specter from the land of Might Have Been.

"There was a wrong done," says Erwin. "It's time to right that wrong, to let it rest. Let Joe rest."

Lester Erwin is a big man who carries some extra pounds around the middle. After a few minutes of pitching batting practice on this steamy Friday evening, he's huffing and puffing. But there's work to do. The American Legion Baseball team he coaches has to limber up for a game, so Erwin's in the netted batting cage off the third base line hurling from behind a screen.

"YOU'VE GOT TO TAKE YOUR WRIST OVER ON THE FOLLOW-THROUGH," he shouts to one hitter.

"IF IT'S INSIDE, YOU'VE GOT TO HIT IT OUT FRONT OF THE PLATE," he calls to another.

In a short while, his boys take their first at-bats at the Berea High School field outside Greenville. Erwin takes his place in the third-base coaching box, sets his game face. Off the field, he's a friendly man who smiles often. Not here. Until the last out, don't try talking with him about anything other than the game. And approach gingerly for that. His face says so. The jaw set, the pale blue eyes locked on the field as if he's worried someone's going to steal it. There is the game and only the game.

He has been drawn to it all his life. The boy with play-by-play running in his head remembers horsing around on old Joe Jackson's front lawn while Jackson sat in the lawn chair and young Lester was "sliding into his legs as a base."

Erwin played first base for Greenville High, later coached high school ball for 23 years until he retired from teaching mathematics. Now he's coaching this American Legion team from Taylors, northeast of Greenville. His wife talked him into it, he says. Yeah, right.

"He's an old throwback to the days of hard work and earning it, discipline. I wanted my son to get some of that," says Erwin's assistant coach, Charlie Forrester, whose son plays first base.

Rita Erwin says her husband is a "real stickler for doing things right."

The diamond can be such a comforting place. It's possible there to always know the right thing to do. Perfect knowledge, if not perfect execution, is within reach.

As if to affirm the field as a place set apart from an otherwise ambiguous universe, the American Legion Code of Sportsmanship is recited before the game begins: "... I will keep a stout heart in defeat; I will keep my pride under in victory. I will keep a sound soul, a clean mind and a healthy body. Gentlemen, let's play ball. ..."

With that, these young heirs of a rich South Carolina baseball tradition take their positions. On fields such as this rose the 19th-century textile mill leagues, and from their player ranks came Joe Jackson. The story is that he went to work for Brandon Mill in West Greenville when he was about 6 years old, helping to support a family that eventually comprised six brothers, two sisters. He had no education, never learned to read or write. He started playing ball for the cotton mill team at 13.

Erwin was about that age when he started getting interested in learning more about Joe Jackson. How could he not wonder? Kate Jackson had died in April 1959 and in her will left instructions to give Joe's baseball bat, the dark brown one stamped "Spalding Old Hickory," to Lester Erwin. Once he had )) the bat, he wanted to know more.

"I found the articles my parents had stashed away in a drawer," says Erwin.

He read how eight players of the heavily favored Chicago White Sox were accused of taking cash bribes from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series and lost the nine-game series 5 games to 3. He learned that the eight were suspended from the team by owner Charles A. Comiskey when the scandal came to light in September 1920. Comiskey told them they would be reinstated if found innocent. He read that the eight were acquitted in a criminal trial in the summer of 1921. Without further hearing, however, they were permanently barred from baseball by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first baseball commissioner. Among the disgraced players was Joe Jackson.

"It was probably some kind of a shock to me," Erwin says. "This guy I had visited. All of a sudden to find out he'd been through this kind of situation."

You hear Erwin tell this, and you have to think of the kid who never existed, the one who supposedly tugged on Jackson's sleeve outside the Chicago courthouse and said, "Say it ain't so, Joe." Nobody believes that. Jackson said it never happened. A columnist from the Chicago Daily News made it up.

Phony or not, the quote has endured, suggesting something about the power of emotional if not literal truth. After World War I, Americans embraced baseball as they never had before. Attendance soared. The game had been corrupted by gambling for years, but owners always managed to cover up, keep the public image of the game and themselves clean. Then comes autumn 1920 and the public revelations about the 1919 series. The facade slips. With it goes a piece of America's innocence.

Since that first troubling revelation, Erwin has learned more. The histories say Jackson signed a confession, a document he could not read, then recanted in testimony before the Cook County grand jury. He played to win, he told the jury. Yes, he got a $5,000 cash bribe from his buddy, pitcher Claude "Lefty" Williams. But he later told an interviewer that he tried to give the money back to Comiskey but Comiskey wouldn't see him.

After the World Series, Kate took dictation and mailed a letter from Jackson to Comiskey, offering to tell what he knew about the "fix." Never got a response. When Comiskey's right-hand man went to Savannah, Ga., early in 1920 to talk with Jackson about his new contract, Jackson again asked what he should do with the money. Keep it, the man supposedly said.

The more Erwin has learned, the more he believes Jackson was a scapegoat for baseball's sins, the more he has faith in his childhood image of Jackson - a good man who loved the game. He was glad to hear that Ted Williams had joined the argument.

"When he speaks, people listen to him," Erwin says. "They may not always agree but they do listen. ... It may be what puts us over the top."

The voice on the phone is what you might expect. Ted Williams, all right.

He suffered one stroke, maybe a couple of others, close friends say. He broke his hip in a fall a few years ago and had it

replaced. He has been through physical and speech therapy. Now listen to the man - turning 80 this month and still roaring, still jabbing. He's on the phone at his kitchen table at home near Hernando, Fla., but it feels as if he's riding you from the bench.

"You're a hard guy to get a hold of," growls Williams, whose assistant called a few minutes before the appointed interview time, got voice mail, then called back. "You'd think you were president of the United States or something."

At another point in the interview, he bellows: "SO, YOU GOT ANY READERS UP THERE?"

Perfect. Let Williams be Williams - always. At least spare the scenes of him ambling along with a walker because the stroke curbed his peripheral vision. Can't play golf, can't fish. Ted Williams can't fish?

Here's a better picture. Put this one in the album with the ghost in the cornfield: The aging slugger, his famously acute vision impaired, steps to the plate one more time. One last swing on behalf of another great hitter dead nearly 50 years. Why? For what? As Williams describes it, for a sense of cosmic justice. A vague need for completion in taking up the cause of the Patron Saint of Unfinished Business: "Shoeless" Joe Jackson.

Williams says he met many retired baseball greats over the years. But in all the trips between Boston and Florida, for all the times he passed through South Carolina, "I never made an effort to go see Joe Jackson. I've always regretted that."

The more he has read about Jackson over the years, the more he has sympathized with him. "He had very little education and was easily led, that's how I look at it."

He gets positively mawkish when he talks about Jackson: visions of Ruth and Gehrig in the sky, a dark cloud where Jackson ought to be, that sort of thing. Williams' co-petitioner is less poetic about the prospect of Jackson's ascension to the Hall of Fame.

"It's not going to happen, and you know why," says Feller, who also turns 80 this month. "The guy took the money, didn't he?"

Feller says he's trying to help an old friend, Ted Williams. Says he told Williams that he figures no commissioner is going to overrule Landis. But if Ted wants to do this, OK. Feller says he'd be happy to see Jackson in the Hall of Fame, if only because there are worse characters already there.

"The biggest crook in the whole deal is Comiskey, and Comiskey's in the Hall of Fame," says Feller, who growls about as well as Williams. "If Comiskey is in the Hall of Fame, then Al Capone should be in the Hall of Fame."

The petition makes a more nuanced, if occasionally disingenuous, argument.

Written by Chicago lawyer Louis R. Hegeman, the 56-page petition and memorandum argue that Jackson is no longer subject to the "ineligible persons" list because he "has not been a 'person' since the 1950s" when he died. He served his lifetime ban. How can he be punished in perpetuity?

Richard Levin, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, says the briefs are "in the process of being evaluated by our attorneys. There is no decision, no timetable."

The "ineligible" list is 14 names long - 13 players and one executive who were suspended for gambling or fixing games. No one has been removed since the list was created. The last player added and the only living person on the list is all-time hits leader Pete Rose, who applied for reinstatement last September.

Rose was suspended in 1989 after Major League Baseball investigated allegations of gambling on baseball games. No specific charges were made, and Rose acknowledged no wrongdoing. He never has. He later pleaded guilty to tax evasion and served five months in federal prison, but that had nothing to do with the alleged gambling.

Williams and other Jackson advocates rightly argue that the Jackson case and the Rose case are entirely different. In terms of Hall of Fame honors, however, the fates of Jackson and Rose are entwined.

For one thing, it's only since Rose was banned that the connection between the "ineligible" list and the Hall of Fame was written into the Hall of Fame rules. And as a practical matter, Major League Baseball probably cannot justify reinstating Jackson and not Rose, or vice versa.

Williams remains undaunted by the tough odds.

"I love this game more than anything that ever happened to me," Williams says. "It's hard for me to believe that baseball wouldn't be fair."

Pictures, newspaper clippings, trophies, an antique baseball bat. Mementos of a life's devotion to baseball occupy a sunny room on the second floor of the Erwins' new home in Powdersville, outside Greenville. Rita calls it "the mausoleum."

On one wall Erwin has assembled a Joe Jackson shrine. Above a bookcase, there's a framed resolution adopted in 1990 by the Chicago Park District pleading for Jackson's reinstatement. There are reproductions of two legal documents signed by Jackson. Erwin sold the two originals to memorabilia dealers for $56,000, perhaps as much as Jackson earned his entire major league career. There's a poster and smaller pictures arranged around it. A portrait in pencil, a framed trading card.

In the portraits the young Jackson looks like something out of a Greek fresco: big, expressive brown eyes, a prominent nose, full lips. The pictures change depending on the light in which you see them. What pieces of the Jackson story have you heard? What are you inclined to believe? What ethical standard do you apply? Was he corrupted, bamboozled, scapegoated?

There's the purity of the diamond, and then there is everything else.

Perhaps the picture changes when you learn that compelling evidence of game-fixing was brought against Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker in 1927, but Judge Landis chose not to investigate, fearing the sport could not withstand another scandal involving two baseball greats. Cobb and Speaker, along with two other players who were accused in their day of betting or fixing games, Rube Waddell and Cap Anson, are in the Hall of Fame.

The picture may or may not have something to do with what you make of Comiskey's role. He did alert American and National League officials of his suspicions early in the series. But why didn't he question his players? According to Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out," Comiskey later cooperated with New York gambler Arnold Rothstein - who financed the scheme - to contain the scandal and avert a penetrating investigation of gambling in baseball. Comiskey, as Feller pointed out, is in the Hall of Fame.

How you see Jackson may even depend on how you see his relationship with his wife, Kate.

In one of Erwin's albums is an undated note written on the back of a prescription form from Jackson's doctor to Kate, who was apparently protective of her husband's health: "Mrs. Jackson, Please let Joe have a meal of fatback and eggs fried in the grease. (one meal)," signed, Dr. B.C. McLawhorn.

"She was Joe's strong suit," says Joe Thompson, who grew up in Greenville and recently self-published a book called "Growing Up With Shoeless Joe." Thompson, 65, whose father was a Greenville sportswriter for many years, says Kate, who could read and write, ran Joe's business affairs.

One local view says Joe wouldn't have been involved in the fix because Kate would not have allowed it. Thompson believes Kate prompted Joe's reported unsuccessful attempts to return his $5,000 bribe to Comiskey and to tell Comiskey what he knew about the scheme.

Perhaps the pictures changes when you learn that there are three different accounts of when the money exchange and Kate's reaction to it took place. Jackson told the grand jury that it happened after the fourth game of the series. He told Joe Thompson's father in an interview that it happened before the first game. Yet another version says it happened after the series was over.

Was Jackson lying? Confused? Why did he confess then repudiate the confession?

It's a confusing story. There were at least two groups of gamblers and eight players. The fix was apparently on and off and on again. It is hardly clear what anyone's understanding of the situation was at any given time.

Never mind all that, says Erwin. Look at the knowable universe, the diamond.

"You don't know what went on in the hotel rooms or anybody's office, but you know what happened on the field," Erwin says.

He's talking about Jackson's record-setting World Series performance. He batted .375, hit the only home run, had six of Chicago's 17 runs batted in and made no errors in left field. Some argue that Jackson did not hit in the clutch and played occasionally lackadaisical defense while avoiding blatant errors. Yet a 10-page analysis of Jackson's performance published in 1993 in the American Statistician concludes, "Almost every statistical view of the game data supports the contention that Joe Jackson played to his full potential in the 1919 World Series."

"He's much more victim than perpetrator," says Leonard Koppett, longtime sports writer, baseball historian and one of 15 members of the Hall of Fame Committee on Baseball Veterans. "He got sucked into it."

Jerome Holtzman, Chicago Tribune baseball writer and Veterans Committee member, has said he sees it simply: Jackson was in on the fix, period. He should not be allowed into the Hall of Fame.

Historian/statistician Bill James, not a committee member, has compared Jackson advocates to "those women who show up at murder trials wanting to marry the cute murderer."

The argument goes on. Baseball historian David Q. Voigt says Jackson emerges as an amalgam of classic American character types: hero, villain and fool.

On the bookshelf beneath Erwin's wall display sits the baseball bat, centerpiece of his collection. Erwin has carried it from house to house with him for going on 40 years now. Much lighter and slimmer than the huge 48-ounce club Jackson swung in the majors, this may be the original bat that Jackson named "Black Betsy."

Sure, Erwin's had offers. He's thought about selling it, talked it over with his old high school friend Charlie Forrester, his assistant baseball coach.

"He's kind of my conscience," says Erwin. "He says, 'Do I have to remind you what you always say? You always say that bat will never leave you unless you donate it to the Hall of Fame when Joe Jackson goes in.'"

And so the bat sits. In another trophy room in another house where faith yet abides in baseball.

Pub Date: 8/02/98