Found this in the ABQ Journal

Shadows of the Diamond
By Toby Smith / Journal Reporter
Monday, 20 July 2009 23:04
Some of the notorious Black Sox wound up playing in a long-forgotten league in New Mexico

Twenty years ago, “Field of Dreams” gave us a Hollywood version of Shoeless Joe Jackson, the immensely talented player forever tied to the baseball’s darkest hour — the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

Instead of Cooperstown, Jackson and seven other members of the Chicago White Sox entered the hall of shame for reportedly throwing the World Series. All were banished for life from organized ball.

Less well known is that some of those punished returned to the national pastime — in New Mexico.

Nobody confused the Copper League with the major leagues. The former was an independent collection of teams that can be traced primarily to the 1920s and to scruffy pockets of southwest New Mexico, southeast Arizona and El Paso/Juarez.

Unrecognized by Major League Baseball, the Copper League, with its short history and shortage of details, is pretty much forgotten today.

This much is known: The Copper League provided a home for outlaws and other castoffs of more legitimate baseball.

Albuquerque’s Mary Darling, 53, is not a researcher. A steadfast fan of baseball, she is a former public school educator. Her interest in the Copper League comes from her late grandfather who lived in Grant County at the time the league flourished. A year ago, while hunting for a retirement project, Darling happened to have a casual conversation with an Albuquerque acquaintance. She mentioned that her grandfather had played baseball for what later became the Copper League.

“Then he must have known Shoeless Joe Jackson!” the acquaintance said, impressed.

Jackson may be the most infamous player of the 20th century. A gifted hitter, (actor Ray Liotta played him in “Field of Dreams”) Jackson became the icon of the Black Sox, though some have disputed his involvement in the actual fixing of games.

As a child Darling heard her grandfather speak of the Black Sox and of Jackson, always unfavorably, for he had grown up in Chicago. When she started looking into the Copper League, she found lots of color and many unanswered questions. It was that mystery that intrigued her that convinced her she had a project and that it should be screenplay and not a book. “I’m a visual person anyway,” she says.

She wanted to show how some of the bad boys of 1919 World Series wound up in New Mexico and what happened to them. Filled with a range of human emotions, it would be fiction, but supported by the framework of the very real Copper League.

Most scholars agree that the league existed from 1925 to 1927. There were four teams for two of those years, six teams for one. When a stern federal jurist named Kenesaw Mountain Landis became baseball commissioner in 1920, he decided to lower the boom on anyone who gave off the faintest whiff of corruption.

Many of those banned went to the Copper League, which Landis tried to shut down. When that failed, Landis tried to penalize any heretofore clean players in the league.

The Black Sox suited up chiefly for the Fort Bayard Veterans, a team supported by the large veterans’ hospital, east of Silver City. The Bayard players from Chicago included pitcher Lefty Williams and first baseman Chick Gandil. Third baseman Buck Weaver played for Douglas, Ariz. The three were recruited to the league by Hal Chase. Not a Black Sox member, Chase, a fine first baseman, had gambled on games throughout his career. Landis, not surprisingly, detested Chase with a passion.

Darling gained some information about the league from microfilm at UNM’s Zimmerman Library. In the Silver City Enterprise, she learned that the Fort Bayard team had the full commitment of the veterans’ hospital. At one time veterans numbering in the thousands were wheeled to home games at the hospital ballpark. Fort Bayard even gave its players jobs.

The Black Sox were not the only black sheep playing in Grant County. After being banned by Landis for taking a bribe, Giants outfielder Jimmy O’Connell eventually relocated to Fort Bayard. Tom Seaton, a spitballer in the minors, was blackballed for “the good of baseball” and eventually performed in games on the Fort Bayard field.

Shoeless Joe Jackson, of course, presents the most tantalizing question for anyone with an interest in the Copper League. Did he actually play games there?

Darling unearthed a 1925 box score of a game in Douglas, Ariz., and the name “Jackson” is listed in the lineup. It could be Shoeless Joe. Then again, maybe not.

Tommy Foy, 94, and a longtime state legislator, was the bat boy for the Fort Bayard Veterans, in 1925. In a telephone interview, Foy says, “I can tell you Joe Jackson was here. I saw him. He was not in uniform, but he came by the field.”

Lynn Bevill, who in 1988 wrote an M.A. thesis on the Copper League while a student at Western New Mexico University, says that Jackson was offered $500 by the El Paso team but wanted more and so didn’t play. Bevill, who has assisted Darling in her inquiries, says there’s a chance Jackson practiced for period on a Juarez field.

Meanwhile, Darling chases leads and writes on, fleshing her story with facts and speculation. She believes it is possible that the great Christy Mathewson, one of the most heralded pitchers ever, was a patient at the Fort Bayard hospital in the 1920s, being treated for TB. Mathewson, long considered to be of the highest of morals, nonetheless was a pal of Hal Chase. For Darling, connecting the dots is not a stretch.

“Baseball players in those days only played baseball,” she says. “It’s what they did. When they couldn’t play, it’s not like they could be trained to do something else. The Copper League paid them and gave them a place to do what they loved.”

In a far-off, dusty corner of the Southwest.