Eight Men Out bats nearly 1.000 on all counts.
In light of the recent gambling scandal in Major League Baseball, I decided to re-watch the film Eight Men Out (1988) about the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. I don’t like most baseball movies because they often get so many things wrong. The players appear to have never swung a bat, the baseball strategy is flawed, or, in the case of historical movies, the history is inaccurate.
That’s why I was surprised to read the late Roger Ebert’s review. The renowned movie critic gave the film only two out of four stars and had many negative things to say about it.
Robert Ebert: It tells the story of how the stars of the 1919 Chicago White Sox team took payoffs from gamblers to throw the World Series, but if you are not already familiar with that story, you’re unlikely to understand it after seeing this film. It’s an insider’s movie, a film by a baseball expert that’s hard for the uninitiated to follow.
First of all, it is unlikely that many non-baseball fans would go to see this movie. But one does not need to be a “baseball expert” to appreciate it. I watched the movie the other night with my adult daughter, a baseball fan, who had only heard of the scandal when I mentioned it to her several days ago. She followed the movie just fine and understood what was happening.
Yet Ebert wrote, “If you’re going to make a movie about a baseball scandal that happened before most of the audience was born, you’d better start by making it understandable.” Ebert also complained, “By the half-hour mark in Eight Men Out, I had little idea who the individual players were, and I wasn’t helped by the fact that many of the actors seemed to resemble each other.”
Granted, there are eight ballplayers to keep track of, but does Charlie Sheen really look like John Cusack? My daughter was able to identify the key participants and recognize the bad guys (the gamblers).
Ebert wrote, “The Sox players are so obviously throwing the game, with deliberate and not even subtle errors, that it’s hard to imagine that anyone could have been fooled, even for a second.”
Indeed, the way the Sox played created suspicion, especially as they were a huge favorite to beat the Cincinnati Reds. But not all the mistakes were obvious, such as when pitcher Ed Cicotte, on a comebacker, threw off the mark to second base on what should have been a double-play ball.
For those who are not “experts” on this episode of baseball history, the Sox played for a cheap owner, Charlie Comiskey, and were tempted to make big money by throwing the Series. Supposedly, eight of them conspired, but, as the movie shows, it is unclear whether third baseman Buck Weaver and outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson intentionally played poorly.
Kid Gleason (photo courtesy American Society of Baseball Research)
The manager, Kid Gleason, is puzzled by his players’ poor performance, as they drop the first two games to the Reds in the best-of-nine-game series. But in Game Three, Dickey Kerr, who is not party to the plot, throws a three-hit shutout, and Gleason is happy again. The Sox, with Cicotte pitching, lost Game Four, his second loss of the Series: the Sox dropped Game Five, the second loss by pitcher Lefty Williams, one of the eight.
The Black Sox had purportedly arranged to receive their bribes in five $20,000 installments—one after each loss—but the gamblers had failed to deliver the full amount. This spurred the cheating ballplayers to pull a double-cross, as they beat the Reds in Games Six and Seven to pull within four games to three in the Series, Cicotte winning Game Seven.
But the gamblers are said to have threatened some of the eight and their families before Game Eight. The movie shows a hooded figure threatening pitcher Williams, and Williams got just one out in the first inning before giving up four runs, prompting Gleason to pull him. We don’t know if Williams was one of those threatened, but I can live with that poetic license.
The only historical inaccuracy I found was a brief conversation in which one of the players claims to have seen Gleason throw a no-hitter against Christy Mathewson. Gleason never pitched a no-hitter.
The eight did face a courtroom trial, and Ebert complained that it “is less about baseball than about the standard cliches of all courtroom scenes.” But the prosecution was dramatic.
A contemporary New York Times account described the scene this way: The spectators added to the bleacher appearance of the courtroom, for most of them sweltered in shirtsleeves, and collars were few. Scores of small boys jammed their way into the seats, and as Mr. Gorman [the prosecutor] told of the alleged sell-out, they repeatedly looked at each other in awe, remarking under their breaths: ‘What do you think of that?’ or ‘Well, I’ll be darned.’” And all the paper records relating to the players’ grand jury confessions vanished under mysterious circumstances.
The film includes the classic line of the boy looking up at Shoeless Joe Jackson, imploring, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” The New York Times reported that when Jackson left the grand jury room, “a crowd of small boys gathered round their idol and asked: ‘It isn’t true, is it, Joe?’ Shoeless Joe replied: ‘Yes, boys, I’m afraid it is.’ ” (I prefer the movie’s grammar.)
Just for fun, I re-created the first game of the 1919 World Series using the identical lineups on my favorite computer simulation game, Old Time Baseball. The Reds won 4-1. Two of Cincinnati’s runs were unearned thanks to a throwing error by Swede Risberg, one of the notorious eight! Did he do it on purpose?
I don’t think the computer program was designed to cheat. But you never know . . . .
