Passing the Buck

Film review: Eight Men Out
Directed by: John Sayles
(1988)

Pure and simple, this film is great fun. It feels light on its feet, shuffling swiftly from World Series day games, to a behind-the-scenes build up of the sloppily conceived scandal, and back to the ballpark. And it always seems to travel in pairs. The entire cast just dances along together, and the joy is infectious. Dealing out their lines with either a knowing smirk or a nervous twitch, the audience can feel the game is rigged. At first, this casual film seems small-fry on the surface, but Sayles manages to sneak in several clever and subtle motifs to enhance the legendary story of the 1919 Black Sox scandal to the level of epic tragedy - or comedy, depending on how you respond to it.

A pair of small-potato, potential World Series fixers (played with screwball charm by Christopher Lloyd and Richard Edson), are seen in the stands speculating on which of the White Sox starters might be susceptible to their scheme. Later, they approach a money man - Abe Attell - who runs rackets for the big cheese in Chi-town - Arnold Rothstein - with their idea to fix the Fall Classic. Attell can dig it, but when he presents it to the boss, Rothstein says no. Attell decides to finance the small-timers anyway while taking a huge cut for himself.

First baseman Chick Gandil also conceives of fixing the Series while meeting with Boston's own heavy better - Sport Sullivan (who ironically gets the go-ahead from Rothstein himself) - and rationalizes that everybody will be a winner if they fix it together, so he'll gladly get the boys on board. Sullivan is surprised to hear how easy it'll be to convince seven players from the best team in the world to flop for a simple chunk of change. "You never played for Charles Comiskey," Gandil says with disgust.

His partner on the diamond, shortstop Swede Risberg, seems especially comfortable with the idea of a conspiracy. However, the top two starting pitchers, Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams, prove much harder to persuade. Without this pair of aces, there's no way the White Sox could intentionally lose the Series to the inferior Reds of Cincinnati. Yet, after Comiskey famously withholds a well-deserved bonus for Cicotte, he, too, figures to finally get his share.

Second baseman Eddie "College Boy" Collins and catcher Ray Schalk are the incorruptible couple; they're not even invited to the secret team meetings. The only infielder left to convince, then, is third baseman Buck Weaver (played perfectly by John Cusack - earnest, naive, and tragic, in turns). But both he and coach Kid Gleason seem so genuinely flabbergasted at the very idea of playing anything but honest baseball (although Buck knows of the fix and Gleason should've known) that we soon learn Buck can't be corrupted either.

A pair of knucklehead outfielders, Happy Felsch and Shoeless Joe, are perceived as the "dumb and dumber" of the American League and are thus easily strongarmed into the charade. (That Felsch is played by the raucous Charlie Sheen now gives the film cultish potentiality). There's plenty of pathos here (Shoeless Joe can't read and is therefore powerless outside the diamond) and cheap laughs are had on their behalf, but there's some real poetry to their play.

Third-sacker Buck Weaver plays a similarly idyllic hot corner with real tenacity (apparently Cusack was coached by recent HOF inductee Ron Santo during the film) and trademark childlike smile, spending his on-screen time off the diamond playing stick ball in alleyways with the neighborhood kids. But of course he's also playing in a figurative hot corner, as Buck finds himself in on the secret, but unwilling to comply with the fix. He stomachs the deceit, plays hard, and impulsively berates his teammates for their deliberately bad play, as if the demands of the game to play properly right now transcend all other agreements, circumstances, or realities. Only zen masters, monkeys, and childlike ballplayers are capable of such dedication to immediate play.

 Buck Weaver, 1913

A pair of reporters - the proverbial Greek chorus (played by a wonderfully smarmy Studs Terkel and with corpse-like solemnity by director John Sayles) - are hot on their trail, noting the instances of fishy fuck-ups and bonehead blunders committed by what some believed, at the time, to be the greatest team they'd ever seen.

As we know by now, the Sox lost the Series in eight (!) games, then got exposed by these reporters, and were eventually indicted for conspiring to throw the Series.

However, most people forget that these immensely popular players were found not guilty by the Chicago jury. But it didn't matter to Kenesaw Mountain Landis - newly appointed commish and totalitarian dictator of baseball. He promptly banned all players for life, as we're often reminded of every time another scandal emerges in baseball or each time we come across Field of Dreams.

So it's home to their families, to their farms, to their ignominious ends. The newly dubbed Black Sox faded into the fabric of American legend. All except for Buck Weaver, who campaigned tirelessly to have his name cleared and his reputation restored so he could return to the game he never could let go of. He was denied and ignored, and he died at 65. At the end of the film, Buck is shown five years after his expulsion watching some bush-league game in Hoboken with a crowd of young men murmuring about the rightfielder, who looks an awful lot like Shoeless Joe. Of course it's him, but Buck assures them "all those players are gone."

The cynic would say Buck only set himself up to be the sap, keeping mum, and believing his teammates would turn the corner and play on the level - or, in the end, believing in some sense of fairness in the baseball hierarchy. But Buck Weaver is clearly a tragic character. It wasn't so much the corruptibility of his fellow teammates -- The Southside Seven -- but the contemptuousness of organized crime, and ultimately of organized baseball itself (embodied in tight-asses Comiskey and Landis) that set him up as the tragic hero of the film. The childlike way in which he played both an ebullient and stalwart Series on such an uneven playing field, combined with his desperate pleas for latter-day absolution, simply puts to rest any doubt of the tragic nature to Buck Weaver's life in baseball.

To be honest, I found Eight Men Out (the film) to be even more enjoyable than Eliot Asinov's detailed, engrossing, but poorly-paced 1963 book by the same name (8 Men Out). Hell, it's the best baseball film I've seen.

Yet.