"YOU SHOELESS SON OF A GUN, YOU!"

Shoeless Joe!

"I loved the game," Shoeless Joe Jackson went on.  "I’d have played for food money.  I’d have played free and worked for food money.  It was the game, the parks, the smells, the sounds.  Have you ever held a bat or baseball to your face?  The varnish the leather.  And it was the crowd, the excitement of them rising as one when the ball was hit deep.  The sound was like a chorus.  Then there was the chug-a-lug of the tin lizzies in the parking lots, and the hotels with their brass spittoons in the lobbies and brass beds in the rooms.  It makes me tingle all over like a kid on his way to his first double header, just to talk about it."

W.P. Kinsella, From Shoeless Joe