Let me preface this by saying that (a) no other paper in the country is reporting this; (b) the information comes from an interested and clearly biased party to begin with; and (c) Major League Baseball is not in the habit of announcing major news by letting said interested parties report it on their Facebook page.
But I link this anyway, both out of curiosity and out of some interest in saying, “see, we saw it first,” in the event anything actually comes of it.
All of that said, this popped up in The Greenville News this afternoon:Major League Baseball has issued a decision on the reinstatement of Shoeless Joe Jackson, according to Arlene Marcley, curator of the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum downtown.
Marcley said she has received a decision from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. The announcement will be revealed Tuesday morning on the museum’s official Facebook page.
My guess: either the news is “nope, nope, nope, nope,” which MLB doesn’t have too much interest in trumping and is thus giving the museum the honor of doing or else this is being misinterpreted by either the museum, the newspaper or both and all that has really happened is the release of some noncommittal official statement, the likes of which Major League Baseball has been giving on Joe Jackson for years.
But, in the event that MLB is actually reinstating Shoeless Joe tomorrow, let us applaud them on new, out-of-the-box ways in which to deliver such news. And let us get out ahead of things by saying that, under no circumstances, does it make “Field of Dreams” anything other than a crappy, sentimental, manipulative and overrated movie.
