In a 1912 interview with the Continental News Service, Joe Jackson said he nearly derailed his career during his two brief stints with Philadelphia in 1908 and 1909:
Jackson recounted failing to appear for a game:
“I know that I was wrong, but I don’t suppose that excuses my conduct any. There are few people who know what this same Mack stood from me before he turned me loose”
Jackson said Mack tried to change him, “with tears in his eyes, but I wouldn’t listen.”
“(O)ne afternoon I was scheduled to play center field for Philadelphia , and on my way to the grounds I took a notion that I’d like to see a show and hopped off the car without a word to anyone and spent the afternoon watching a burlesque show.
“I just escaped being a second Rube Waddell or a Bugs Raymond. Mack did everything possible to make me see the folly of my ways, but he finally lost patience and but me on the blacklist, where I would have remained for the rest of my life if he hadn’t been the kind man he is.”
Failing to change Jackson’s ways, in the spring of 1910, Mack:
“(T)old me to pick out the club I’d prefer to go with and he’s see what could be done.’
“A few days later he came to me and said: ‘I’m sorry, Jackson, that you refuse to settle down and take ball playing seriously, because you have the makings of a crackerjack player in you.”
Jackson was sent to New Orleans:
“It wasn’t until I was well on my way South that I began to realize what an opportunity I had lost. Mack was not the first manager whose friendship I had sacrificed by my foolish actions, but it was he who brought me to my senses. I made up my mind long before I reached New Orleans that I’d cut out my kiddish way and then try to get Mack to give me another chance.”
He said of his time in New Orleans, where he hit .354 in 136 games:
“Having made up my mind to attend to my knitting, I played every game and never missed a morning’s practice.”
Jackson was traded to the Naps and hit .387 in 20 games with Cleveland.
As another example of his behavior before his New Orleans epiphany, he told a story about a run in with umpire Fred Westervelt when both were in the South Atlantic League in 1909.
Jackson said he and teammate Ed Lauzon, “who was the official troublemaker,” on the Savannah Indians:
“Along about the second inning…left the field and took seats in the grandstand with the spectators. Manager (Ernest) Howard sent Harry King [sic, Kane] to get us, and we persuaded him to gather around the festive board. When Howard, who was a player as well as a manager, saw the three of us lined up eating peanuts he also joined the gathering.”
Westervelt gave the four players two minutes to return to the field, when they refused, Jackson was fined $50, King was fined $35 and Lauzon and Howard received suspensions.
“I don’t tell you this because I think now it was funny, but merely to show you how much interest I took in baseball when I got my name on Manager Mack’s list of what, I believe, he calls his ‘daffy players,.’ No one regrets these incidents more than myself, and you can bet it’s me for the straight and narrow hereafter as long as I am in the game.”
Baseball History Daily 