Eight Men Out and the Black Sox Scandal on Screen

In 1977, a young filmmaker named John Sayles wrote a screenplay about the 1919 Black Sox scandal. He had read Eliot Asinof's 1963 book Eight Men Out and saw in it something more than a sports story. He saw a labor dispute. Eight underpaid baseball players, exploited by a miserly owner and manipulated by gamblers, made a terrible decision that destroyed their careers and nearly destroyed the game. Sayles wrote the script, drew storyboards, and then waited eleven years to make the film.

"People said, 'Oh, you'll never get this made,'" Sayles later told Bob Costas on MLB Network. "'There's a curse on it. People have been trying to make it for years.'"

The film was finally released in 1988, shot largely at Bush Stadium in Indianapolis on a modest budget that couldn't afford enough extras to fill the stands. Ring Lardner Jr., the Oscar-winning screenwriter and son of the legendary sportswriter who covered the real 1919 White Sox, visited the set and reported that the production crew had to make "a few hundred extras look like a World Series crowd of thousands." They offered free entertainment, bingo, and $20 a day.

What Sayles put on screen was unlike any baseball movie before it. Eight Men Out does not have a hero. It has a dozen characters, each with different motives, different levels of guilt, and different fates. David Strathairn plays Eddie Cicotte as a man nearing the end of his career, desperate to secure his family's future and furious at the owner who promised him a bonus and then benched him to avoid paying it. John Cusack plays Buck Weaver as a man who knew about the fix, took no money, played his heart out in every game, and Commissioner Landis banned him for life anyway. D.B. Sweeney plays Shoeless Joe Jackson as an illiterate outfielder who may or may not have understood what he was agreeing to.

Sweeney, a former college outfielder at Tulane, trained with the Class-A Kenosha Twins for approximately seven weeks to prepare for the role. A natural right-handed hitter, he spent six months learning to bat left-handed to match Jackson. Sayles hired the actors for their baseball ability as much as their acting talent. Charlie Sheen, who played Hap Felsch, would go on to star in Major League the following year.

The gamblers are equally well-drawn. Michael Lerner plays Arnold Rothstein as a calm, calculating businessman, Christopher Lloyd makes "Sleepy Bill" Burns a bumbling intermediary, and Kevin Tighe renders "Sport" Sullivan a smooth operator. The film shows how the fix was not one conspiracy but several overlapping ones, with the gamblers double-crossing the players and each other.

Sayles cast himself as Ring Lardner and Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago historian and oral history pioneer, as sportswriter Hugh Fullerton. The two serve as a Greek chorus, watching the games, sensing the fix, and trying to blow the whistle. Their scenes together are among the film's best, dry and funny and heartbreaking.

The film made only about $5.6 million at the box office. Roger Ebert found it "oddly unfocused." But its reputation has grown steadily. Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 87% approval rating. Several people involved in the production went on to work on Ken Burns's 1994 Baseball documentary. Cusack contributed voice-overs and Burns interviewed Terkel for the Black Sox segment.

What makes Eight Men Out endure is what made Sayles want to make it in the first place. It's a movie about what happens when workers are treated badly enough that they'll burn down their own house to get back at the landlord. The 1919 White Sox were among the greatest teams ever assembled, and they were paid less than players on mediocre teams because Charles Comiskey could get away with it. The fix didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of the economics of baseball in 1919, and Sayles made sure the audience understood that before anyone threw a game.