Puckett and Johnson grew up going to baseball games, one in Cleveland, the other in Atlanta. Shoeless Joe costume design by Trevor Bowen The three people most responsible for “The Fix” - Puckett, Simonson and the company’s creative adviser, Dale Johnson – share an enthusiasm for baseball. And yet, because of the scandal, he was never placed in the Baseball Hall of Fame and, in Simonson’s view, probably never will be. Many fans rank him with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth as the three best players of all time - or at least in the first half of the 20 th century. Jackson, who died in 1951, continues to have the third-highest career batting average in major-league history. A fan, so the story goes, hollered from the stands, “You shoeless son of a gun,” and the nickname stuck. Without doubt, “The Fix” is the first opera to deal with the scandal of 1919 and to focus especially on Joe Jackson, whose nickname “Shoeless” derived from early in his career when, plagued during a game by tight-fighting new shoes, he took them off and ran to third base in his socks. It remains popular and is frequently revived. The best known, “Damn Yankees,” racked up more than 1,000 performances on Broadway starting in 1955 and was later turned into a film. As far as musicals go, there have been just a few. And just two years ago the Pittsburgh Opera gave the first performances of “The Summer King” with a score by Daniel Sonenberg that tells the story of baseball legend Josh Gibson, “the Black Babe Ruth,” as he was known, who was only the second African-American player to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. That honor probably goes to the American composer William Schuman, whose one-act opera “The Mighty Casey,” based on the comic poem “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer, was premiered in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1953. “The Fix,” it so happens, isn’t the first opera about baseball. Performing at a workshop during the development of "The Fix" are, from left, Sidney Outlaw, who is singing the role of Claude “Lefty” Williams conductor Timothy Myers and Joshua Dennis portraying "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. In the view of Eric Simonson, who wrote the opera’s libretto and is staging the work, Joe, though he was illiterate, is a character of substance whose fate rises to the level of tragedy. The opera moves Jackson to center stage, along with his wife, Katie, which gives the two of them the excuse to sing a lush, romantic duet in each of the work’s two acts. He keeps Jackson in the background while focusing on two pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Claude “Lefty” Williams. Asinof’s scholarship has been questioned, however, along with his mixing of fictional and historical characters. “Eight Men Out,” a book by Eliot Asinof published in 1963 and later adapted for the screen by John Sayles, tells the story. Charged with nine counts of conspiracy to defraud, they were acquitted in a jury trial in 1921, but newly appointed baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw “Mountain” Landis barred them for life from professional baseball. The result of Puckett’s efforts, encompassing more than two years of work, will be unveiled Saturday night at the Ordway Music Theater in the form of a new opera titled “The Fix.” Commissioned and produced by Minnesota Opera as part of its enterprising New Works Initiative, the opera recounts the infamous Black Sox Scandal of 1919, wherein Jackson and seven teammates of the Chicago White Sox were accused of conspiring with gamblers to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. In the autumn of 2016, faced with the prospect of writing a two-hour opera on the unlikely subject of baseball, composer Joel Puckett got on the Ebbets Field website and ordered a vintage semi-authentic 1919 Chicago White Sox ball cap - “crafted from genuine wool.” When the cap arrived at his home in Baltimore, Puckett put it on, sat down at the piano and began to improvise - singing and playing - the first scene of an opera that takes place in Greenville, S.C., at the modest home of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, one of the most famous, gifted and perhaps saddest players in baseball history.
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