Baseball legend and Greenville native Shoeless Joe Jackson memorabilia up for auction

He was 64 when he died in 1951 of a heart attack in his native Greenville, decades after his monumental rise and fall in Major League baseball, and yet, the legend of Shoeless Joe Jackson continues to grow.

Long-lost items like signed baseballs and photos have been auctioned, including a 1911 photo that sold for $1.4 million in 2021, the most ever paid for a signed sports photograph.

Now comes a 1910 Old Mill Cigarettes Series 8 Joe Jackson baseball card, auctioned by Heritage Auctions as part of its 2026 April 3 - 4 Spring Sports Card Catalog Auction.

Bidding has surpassed $500,000 and the auction house thinks it could go to $800,000 or more.

It shows him at 22 when he was playing outfield for the New Orleans Pelicans minor league team, his last before rejoining the Major Leagues.

He batted .408 average for the 1911 Cleveland Naps, on his way to a lifetime .356 batting average of .365 over a 13-season Major League career that ended in the famous Black Sox scandal.

Jackson and seven other members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of fixing the 1919 World Series. He was banned from the league in 1921 and ruled ineligible for induction on the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred last year lifted the ban against Jackson and Pete Rose, who was banned for betting on baseball. Jackson’s first chance at induction into the hall is 2028.

“The recent centennial of the Black Sox scandal has done little to quiet the debate over culpability, and compelling evidence of Jackson’s innocence survives in his World Series stat line,” Heritage said on its website.

Jackson’s 1949 South Carolina driver’s license and a card from Cracker Jacks boxes were auctioned in 2021.

Because Jackson was illiterate, his signature is rare and considered one of the most valuable in the world. Most signatures purported to be his were actually those of his wife, Katie. He usually marked an X on paperwork.

Sotheby’s sold a signature from a lease in 1991 for $23,000.

A couple of years after that auction, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society sued the Greenville County Probate Court for his will, which bore his signature.

The two charities were the heirs of Katie Jackson, who left them $60,000 and asked that her personal property be sold and split between them.

Joe Jackson died of heart failure in 1951 and Katie Jackson of cancer in 1959. The South Carolina Supreme Court ultimately ruled wills are government property.

His bat, which he called Black Betsy, sold at auction for more than $577,000 in 2001.

Jackson got his start in baseball on the field outside of Brandon Mill in the Textile League. He told Sport Magazine in 1949 he got his nickname because he had blisters on his feet during a game and took his cleats off.

After he was banned from baseball he ran a liquor store in West Greenville and lived in a little brick house, which was moved and is now the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum beside the Greenville Drive baseball stadium in downtown Greenville.

Jackson is also honored in Greenville with a statue in the West End and a baseball field in the Brandon community. He is buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park, where it’s not unusual to see a bat or a ball beside his bronze marker.

A story about Jackson’s years in Greenville is that Ty Cobb and sportswriter Grantland Rice were driving through Greenville after the Masters Tournament at Augusta. They found Jackson in his liquor store.

Cobb is said to have asked Jackson “Don’t you know me, Joe?”

Jackson responded, “Sure, I know you, Ty, but I wasn’t sure you wanted to know me. A lot of them don’t.”