Say it’s so for Shoeless Joe

On the White Sox outfield wall are the numbers of 10 great ballplayers. But the name of an 11th great, possibly the greatest of them all, is missing — Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Shoeless Joe prowled the Sox outfield at old Comiskey Park from 1915 through 1920. His career stats both hitting and fielding are awesome. Batting: .356. Slugging: 517. On base: .423. Fielding: .988.

Alas, Jackson’s career was cut short at age 33 in 1920 when he was implicated in the 1919 “Black Sox” World Series scandal, being one of the infamous eight Black Sox banned for life. Jackson was an illiterate dupe, not an active participant, twice refusing the $5,000 bribe that eventually was thrown at his feet by the other seven players, who needed his imprimatur on the conspiracy. Jackson then turned in a bravura performance in the World Series, batting .375, 24 points above his regular season average. He had no errors in 17 chances, and threw out a runner for a double play to boot.

It’ll be 98 years on April 5 when the Sox open at Comiskey Park (fageddabout the commercial moniker) without Shoeless Joe in the lineup. Wouldn’t it be a nice bit of mercy and forgiveness for the Sox to bury the baseball bat and put Shoeless Joe up on the wall with the other 10 Sox immortals?

Call it “Say It’s So, Joe, Day.”

Walt Zlotow, Glen Ellyn

Love the new Sun-Times look

Now living in Traverse City, I can’t comment on your new print design, but the web page looks great; a huge improvement. It’s just great to have the Sun-Times back as a real metropolitan newspaper. Best of luck going forward. And reporter Lynn Sweet is a gem.

Stuart Tarr, Traverse City, Michigan

Ditto on the look

Thanks for the redesign online. This is how your layout should be.

Jason Adrian, Lakeview

Going ‘green’ in Chicago starts at home

We appreciated your March 26 editorial regarding Philadelphia’s success with flood-preventing “green infrastructure.”

A major priority for the Greens for MWRD campaign, a unified slate of Green Party candidates for the board of Commissioners of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, is green infrastructure development.

As your editorial rightly points out, individual MWRD candidates from the Democrat ticket will occasionally talk up the need for more green infrastructure, but large-scale development has been slow to take hold.

Major infrastructure development of any kind requires buy-in from multiple levels of government, but one obvious starting place for the MWRD would be on the department’s own land. Currently the department owns roughly 9,500 acres of Cook County land, much of which is leased to for-profit tenants with no water treatment or flood prevention role. As your newspaper has reported in the past, some of those tenants are actual waterway polluters, renting land from the agency tasked with keeping our waterways clean.

Ending the “toxic tenant” leases and repurposing MWRD land for floodwater-absorbing green development seems like a no-brainer.

Chris Anthony

Karen Roothaan

Tammie Vinson

Rachel Wales

Geoffrey Cubbage