Shoeless Joe

In a recent article on the Mitchell report, Thomas Boswell, who should know better than to get baseball history from Field of Dreams, writes,

Shoeless Joe Jackson, an illiterate outfielder who hit like a demon in the 1919 World Series, but neglected to blow the whistle on his crooked teammates, died with his good name as black as their Sox.

Side point: why is "illiterate" in this sentence? Hypothesis: it's there to distract us from the plain facts of what Joe Jackson did in 1919.

May I volunteer an alternative version of Boswell's sentence? I may? Super!

Shoeless Joe Jackson, an outfielder who took money from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series, performed dramatically differently in the straight and crooked games, and later described--under oath and in detail--how he contributed to throwing the Series, subsequently died.