Eight men out Essay Example For Students

Eight men out Essay Eight Men OutIn the golden days of baseball, where the heros became legends and young fans could actually afford to pay to attend the games, an incident that would scar baseball for life was committed in the World Series of 1919. Based on the Elliot Asinofs 1963 best-seller of the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, Eight Men Out is an attempt to tell the story of how the White Sox were hired by gamblers to throw World Series. Film maker John Sayles brings in a variety of well- known actors to play roles of players, gamblers, and everyone else that is involved in the scandal. However, the movie concentrates more on the events leading up to the scandal and the personalities of the characters, and overlooks minor, but extremely important, details that leave any avid baseball fan questioning it consistency. Bill James, in his Historical Baseball Abstract, makes very clear the underlying problems with making a movie about the Black Sox Scandal. James, as well as many others, feels as though the prob lems with making a movie about that topic is that it engages the emotions of the audience. He points out that, Unlike a book, a movie is more of something you experience than learn about, and as such, for a movie to work, one must, as a viewer, share in the experience of one of the characters (pg.108). Since this story is about ballplayers who threw games and accepted bribes, this poses a difficult problem in asking the audience to share the feelings of the conspirators. That is the problem throughout the movie that Sayles fails to resolve. Where do the audiences sympathies lie? It is hard to maintain sympathy for the players with the likes of Swede Risberg and Chic Gandil behind the fix. Players like Buck Weaver and Shoeless Joe Jackson, who are portrayed as pawns in a game of chess, are overwhelmed by the gamblers and other players involved. One could say that Sayles sees the team members as underpaid and unappreciated by team owner Charles Comiskey, and the results of the tension that existed between the players and the owner was the fixing of the 1919 Series. Sayles shows us the individual players going all out, running hard, dive for balls, stretching doubles into triples, and risking injury to win the pennant. The mood quickly changes as the players being ecstatic, having won the pennant, turning to anger and malcontent after their promised bonus turns out to be flat champagne. Sayles emphasizes the dissention between Comiskey and the players by staging a scene between pitcher Eddie Cicotte and the cold owner. Cicotte, on a technicality, is not given the $10,000 bonus he was to receive for winning 30 games. Cicotte in fact only won 29 games, and implies that Comiskey purposely benched him so he couldnt win 30. Sayless sympathy for Cicotte is clear in the movie when Ring Lardner (played by Sayles himself) responds to Comiskeys praise of his players by stating, If he is such a fan, why doesnt he pay them a living wage?. Sayles maintains that only after his failed attempt at his bonus did Cicotte partake in fixing the series. Cicotte is the key player in order to pull off the scam, once he falls, everyone else follows his lead. Cicotte certainly led the way in dumping the first game of the series. In the bottom of the 1st inning of Game 1, he plunked the first batter he faced, as a signal to the gamblers that the fix was on. Cicotte (winner of 29 regular season games and a 1.82 ERA) gave up several hits and six runs in the opening innings of the game in route to a 9-1 loss (Baseball Encyclopedia pg. 311). Cicottes performance in Game 1 was accompanied by Swede Risbergs error on a would- be double-play that eventually led to the Reds 5 runs in the bottom of the fourth inning. Lefty Williams, another key figure (pitcher) in the fix, pitched Game 2 of the Series. Though he held Cincinnati to only 4 hits, he uncharacteristically walked six batters and struck out only one batter. His performance was bad enough for an eventual 4-2 loss. Cat cher Ray Schalk, who was not part of the scandal, complains in the movie that Williams crossed up the signals deliberately in order to aid the hitters. Schalk physically attacks Williams in a tirade because of his frustration.Cicotte and Williams together made valuable contributions to the dumping of all 5 games that the Sox lost. Together their records were 1-5 with 13 BBs, only 11 Ks, and an ERA well over 4.0 (which was unbelievably high for this time period). These men certainly held up their end of the bargain in not pitching to their full potential, and ultimately costing the Sox the Series. But they were not alone in their crookedness. The other players that made noticeable mistakes in the 8 games; Happy Felsch, Swede Risberg, and Chic Gandil each made their contributions for dumping Games 2 and 4 by making obvious baserunning errors, fielding and throwing errors, and of course being unproductive at the plate. Risberg, Gandil, and Felsch went a combined 15-81 at the plate for a meager .186 batting average, to go along with only 6 runs, and 8 RBIS. The crew also had 3 costly errors in the field that resulted in 10 runs for Cincinnati. Hitler and the Holocaust EssaySayles gives us an internal game in the movie that is very difficult for the average viewer to see. It is very much a game of wage earners against employers, not the Chicago White Sox vs. the Cincinnati Reds. The Black Sox scandal was an important symbolic event in American history. The great American institution of baseball, which represented our finest traditional values, was revealed to be corrupt. As Steven Riess so appropriately states, If baseball was no good, what hope was there for the rest of our culture and society? (pg. 65).