This Baseball Movie Is Far From a Natural

How would you like to see a movie that has eight villains, no heroes and in which, in a manner of speaking, everybody dies in the end?

How about a movie in which the love interest is a suitcase full of money? Boy meets money, boy loses game, boy loses money. Think it’ll sell in Sheboygan, play in Petaluma?

No, it’s not an Italian movie. It’s not even Francis Ford Coppola. It’s not part animation. All the characters are real enough.

They say baseball pictures don’t make it at the box office. Well, this isn’t about baseball. It’s about greed and ignorance and betrayal. The Lou Gehrig story, it ain’t. The actors are wearing baseball uniforms, but they could be wearing Roman togas. Their story is universal, timeless. It’s as old as Adam and Eve. It’s an immorality play. Man loses to temptation--again.

“Eight Men Out” is about the blackest episode in American sports history. There have been fixed fights, thrown tennis matches, staged horse races. But--so far as we know--there’s only been one fixed World Series. The 1919 one, which, as Ring Lardner once wrote, the Cincinnati Reds won, considerably to their surprise.

The public view of this scandal is that it was a smooth, cynical, underworld operation in which the gamblers made millions, the players got paid off and, if everyone had kept his mouth shut, the world would never have been the wiser.

Actually, it was a mishmash of comedic mishaps. It was disorganized crime, a plot for the Marx Brothers, not the Barrymore brothers.

Eight disgruntled Chicago White Sox ballplayers, led by light-hitting, slick-fielding first baseman Chick Gandil, wanted to throw the 1919 World Series and went in search of a gambler to pay them to do so. They found a lot of penny-ante, pool parlor bookmakers who had neither the capital nor the know-how.

From then on, the story line is right out of Damon Runyon. The bumblers had to go to the sinister coffers of the infamous Arnold Rothstein, America’s gambler, to get the money, but they left a trail of giveaways that alerted every betting commissioner in the country, and several reporters, to the fact the Series was off the level.

There is no evidence the conspirators ever received much of their promised payoffs, except for Gandil, who took his off the top. It’s not even clear that they ultimately threw the Series.

They certainly threw the first two games and that, apparently, was enough. By then, they were so confused, suspicious, disillusioned and disgraced, they couldn’t right themselves if they had wanted to. By then, the whole country had guessed their awful secret and the great journalist, Ring Lardner, went around singing, “I’m forever blowing ballgames,” in the club car of the team train or wherever an audience gathered.

Still, their secret might have remained that except for a grand jury that was impaneled to investigate a rumored fix of a regular-season Cubs-Phillies game and decided that, as long as it was sitting, it might as well drag in the ’19 World Series and either firm up or lay to rest all the malicious gossip.

The players blabbed. The whole sordid mess went on the record, at last. The eight were indicted. The term Black Sox went into the language. Justice seemed to have been finally served.

But, was it? When the trial came up, the signed confessions mysteriously disappeared--those things used to happen all the time in Chicago. The defendants were acquitted.

But, even though he was a federal judge, the man baseball had named commissioner to restore public trust in the game, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was not so impressed with legal technicalities. The confessions might not have been good enough for a Cook County jury, but they were good enough for him. He threw all eight men out of baseball, forever.

A storefront lawyer, or, at least, one of those baseball arbitrators the game hires today could get a dictatorial decision like that thrown into the Ohio River. But the way of the transgressor was harder then. None of them ever played another inning of organized baseball. They were non-persons in baseball.

It’s an important story. But is it Hollywood’s cup of tea? Hollywood’s idea of a baseball picture is Lou Gehrig dying or a kind of soft-porn epic emphasizing the extra-inning games that never get in the box scores.

This is not “Bull Durham.” But the producers of “Eight Men Out,” perhaps encouraged by the successes of “Chariots of Fire” and “Phar Lap,” sports stories far removed from the “One Minute to Play” musicals, have chosen to, so to speak, tell it like it was.

What it was, was an American tragedy. Apparently, throwing baseball games was the real American pastime in those days, when even superstars got peon wages.

The Black Sox were a simple, uneducated lot who didn’t see that a World Series was, as the saying goes, a whole different ballgame. Fixing a weekend series with Cleveland for a modest killing at the books was just boys-will-be-boys. Fixing the World Series was burning the flag, voting Communist.

Nobody went to jail. But they got life sentences all the same. A man who robs banks, a Jesse James, can have a certain cachet, a certain nobility, even. A man who trifles with the faith of a generation of boys is not so admirable. “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” became the heartbroken motto for the whole sordid episode.

How good were the 1919 Chicago White Sox? Probably the best in the game at the time.

Joseph Jefferson Jackson, Shoeless Joe, was a right fielder right out of a storybook. He couldn’t read or write, but he hit .408 one year, .395 another, .387 another and .382 his last year in the game. Uneducated, uncomplicated, he probably never really understood the implications of what he was going along with.

He kept writing to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey in the off-season, trying to tell him what had happened. He hit .375 in the Series, setting a record with 12 hits, a home run and 6 runs batted in. He didn’t make an error. He got $5,000 for throwing the Series. He could have gotten $5,207.41, the winners’ share, for winning the World Series. Joe not only couldn’t read or write, he couldn’t add.

He’d probably be a hero in a Robert Redford movie. He’s just another villain in this. For Joe, it was so.