If Eliot Asinof couldn't do it, I doubt anyone could. The author's account of the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal is so meticulous, it sometimes seems as if Asinof had been pressed up against the players' hotel room doors with a glass in his hand, eavesdropping on their conversations -- untrue in any sense, since EIGHT MEN OUT was published over 40 years after the series in question. He sifts through contemporary news stories and columns and court transcripts galore, but he can't tell us why eight members of the Chicago White Sox would decide to throw the World Series, believe they could get away with it, and (to a certain extent) go on with their lives.
There are a lot of unbelievable facets to the Black Sox scandal, and I don't really want to spoil them for anyone who, like me, may be going into this book with only a vague outline of the scandal. But here is your vague outline: Eight players on the White Sox, gathered by first baseman Chick Gandil (whose Wikipedia picture could not be less flattering), made an agreement with a gambler, a former boxer and a gangster -- with their innumerable intermediaries, anyway -- to throw the Series against the Cincinnati Reds for $100,000. The gamblers bet against the Sox (favored to win) and make oodles of money. Everybody wins until American League president Ban Johnson seizes an opportunity to humiliate the White Sox owner and promote himself as anti-gambling and decides to investigate the rumors that had swirled around the previous year's series.
Johnson didn' really get what he wanted from the revelation of the scandal, nor did gambling in baseball end. The fans didn't really get justice, even though the players involved were famously banned from baseball for the rest of their lives. (Perhaps an over-punishment for Buck Weaver? Hold that thought for a minute.) As reprehensible as what the players did was, justice wasn't served.
Getting back to the why: Gandil was the fixer, but Cicotte -- the only player smart enough to insist on being paid up front -- seemed like the linchpin. In some ways, he's the most tragic figure of the book, or at least that's how Asinof chose to see it. Cicotte's testimony is heartbreaking and disingenuous at the same time. I wanted to believe him, but given how he and his teammates were treated it's hard to know how much he really revealed under oath. (Being told they're signing a document protecting their immunity, when it actually waives their immunity?) If I had a problem with Asinof's account it was in his characterization of some of the players, about which I had similar reservations as with Cicotte's own words: Shoeless Joe is altogether too stupid to know what's going on, depending on his wife to read his contracts, and Buck Weaver is too "All-American" to cheat (but not too much to be in on the fix?) and bewildered when he's forced to share the fate of his fellows. Maybe those didn't seem too general so much as undersourced.
Of course I realized only too late that EIGHT MEN OUT is not the right book with which to kick off a whole week of books about baseball, in that it shows the dark side of the sport. A theme that will carry on throughout the week? Perhaps!
Tomorrow: You may be part of the conspiracy too with Philip Roth's THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.
1 comment:
To be certain, Joe Jackson was uneducated and probably not very intelligent. On the other hand, he was a grown man and should have known better than to do what he did.
Its a very interesting period in baseball history, and the scandal led to the creation of the office of the Commissioner of Baseball, which was filled by Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who was staunchly opposed to segregation. Who knows whether it would have happened sooner under someone else's watch, but it is an interesting "what if" to ponder.
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