Eight Men Out (1988)

Directed by John Sayles

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A change of pace here at Word and Song — a film whose only connection to our Word of the Week is the coincidence that eight happens to be involved; or maybe there’s more, by way of negation. But let that be for now.

Eight Men Out is a film that the director and writer John Sayles, an independent if there ever was one, had been planning for a very long time. It’s about the infamous Black Sox scandal of 1919, when eight men on the American League champion White Sox team took money to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. At that time, the Series was best-of-nine; the Reds won it, 5 games to 3. Since the White Sox were heavily favored, a lot of vile people aimed to make a lot of money betting against the odds.

Here I should explain a couple of things that might give you hope that institutions that seem beyond reform can turn themselves around. In the 1910’s, baseball was divided between upstanding citizens and rowdies. Some of the good guys were clean-cut college men like Christy Mathewson, who gets my vote for finest human being ever to hurl the horsehide; others were kindly ethnic sorts, glad and grateful to live in America and to make a living playing a boy’s game, like Honus Wagner. Some of the rowdies were roughnecks (Ty Cobb, who by the way was extremely intelligent), drunks (Rube Waddell, who was not), clowns (Rabbit Maranville), guys who would cheat to win, and guys who were thoroughly corrupt (Hal Chase). Though most of the star players made a very good living, not all of them did, so that baseball was teetering between the raffish and the professional, or even between the dirty and the clean.

The decade was full of players accused of throwing a game here or there. So the White Sox in 1919 were split into two factions, each of which cordially hated the other. On the one side, you had Eddie Collins, the fiery catcher Ray Schalk, the manager Kid Gleason who had all he could do to keep the team from a mutual bloodbath, and other honest men; on the other side, the sleazy and the disaffected, who brought into their cabal the Sox’s ace pitcher Eddie Cicotte, and the illiterate star outfielder Joe Jackson. But how did they lure Cicotte in? By way of stingy, selfish, promise-breaking, self-important owner, Charlie Comiskey, who had the best baseball team on earth, and treated his players like wage slaves. Cicotte’s contract had included a $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games. With two weeks left in the season, Comiskey ordered Gleason to bench Cicotte, causing him to miss four starts — and there went his chance for the money, which he and his family needed. Cicotte’s revenge was to join the corrupt.

Of course, this all had to be done with the collusion of organized crime, and that’s well shown in the film, with the silky financier Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner) using the players like puppets, through the vile go-between “Sport” Sullivan (Kevin Tighe; yes, the good-guy Roy De Soto on the old Emergency show). Baseball had become America’s pastime: teams were everywhere; factories had them, small towns, fraternal organizations; and boys looked up to heroic ballplayers. So when a couple of brave and stubborn men would not look the other way and would not shut up about what they perceived, the whole nation had to take notice. One of these was the sportswriter Ring Lardner (played by Studs Terkel in the film); another was Mathewson himself, then struggling with the lung disease he had gotten while helping to train men against chemical warfare in World War I. It all came to a trial — and, of all things, the cheats beat the rap! At least, they beat it in the court of law. But the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (John Anderson), had other thoughts.

The film is not preachy, in either direction. The cheats had cause to hate their owner; and they were cheats. Pay close attention to the clean catcher Schalk, who would be the first person on the field to see that something was up. Pay attention to the compromised manager Kid Gleason, who has to confess at one point that he no longer has control over his club. But especially pay attention to Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn), his wife, Joe Jackson, and Buck Weaver (played sensitively by John Cusack). Cicotte is a good man gone bad, for good reason, but he has joined bad men to do it. Love does not excuse him. Weaver broke with the cheats, whom he came to loathe, but he kept quiet about the conspiracy, and that meant that he shared their guilt. As for Jackson, the main defense is that he was too dim in the brains and too focused on baseball to know what he was signing up for. Jackson did have a very good Series, on paper, but it does appear that he took the bribe.

It’s said that one day, one of the sweetest and most affable of Christians was in Rome, and he saw a man being led away to execution. “There but for the grace of God goes Philip Neri,” he said, referring to himself. Whatever else John Sayles intended, Eight Men Out shows us that when the terrible moral crisis comes, good intentions and a nice disposition, alone, will not suffice. Christy Mathewson, who all through his wonderful career pitched on short rest on Saturday rather than working on the Sabbath, might have had a little to say about that need of ours, too.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We thank you for reading Word and Song!

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