Movie Review: Eight Men Out

By Randy White

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What Parents Should Know
Parents should know that kids will see some idolized baseball players smoke, gamble, and ultimately purposefully lose a game to line their own pockets. This historical piece is a treat for baseball aficionados, but others may lack the stamina for the plodding examination of responsibility and betrayal.

Families who watch this movie might discuss the limitations of historical dramas. Do the characters act like and say the exact words that the real people they portray did? How can films slant a story? Were the players who threw the game portrayed sympathetically? What about the owner?

Common Sense Media Review
Scandal taints the 1919 World Series when the Chicago White Sox are banned from baseball for throwing the games. The movie, however, finds that the team's owner must share the blame for the scandal. Baseball fans may not mind the slow pacing.

In 1919, the Chicago White Sox are heavily favored to take the Series. Despite the team's talent, Sox-owner Charles Commisky abuses and underpays his players. Frustrated, a number of Sox players agree to throw the World Series for $10,000 each. Even the team's star, Shoeless Joe Jackson, seems party to the deal.

Actually, the team is split, and as the losses mount, the players feud openly. Rumors of the rigging spread, and the sports writers try to figure out who is involved. Some players have second thoughts, but the gamblers get nasty and the Sox tank the series. The trial is a whitewash and the players are found innocent, but the judge is appointed baseball commissioner and expels them all from the game.

This slow-paced period-piece takes an unexpected stance on the "Black Sox" scandal, one of the darkest moments in baseball history. Instead of blaming the players who took the payoff, writer/director John Sayles suggests that the owner's greed was ultimately responsible for the incident. The owner was known for shenanigans like promising a pitcher a $10,000 bonus for thirty wins then benching him after his twenty-ninth.

Sayles's portrayal of the scandal makes the assertion that profiteering employers have too much power and tend to abuse their workers. This agenda places EIGHT MEN OUT in the cinematic tradition of baseball movies as social commentary. One of the earliest examples is The Jackie Robinson Story , the 1950 biography of professional baseball's first African American player. An emblem of the nation, baseball movies depict both America's faults and virtues.

Sayles, however, is not making just a political movie. He recognizes that at least a few of the White Sox players are motivated by greed, and he showcases the public pain that their betrayal causes. "Say it ain't so, Joe" is the famous refrain of one disbelieving youngster. Buck Weaver (John Cusack) is the movie's most sympathetic character not only because he shuns the gamblers, but because he understands how the scandal affects the kids on the street.

Eight Men Out is provocative if overly focused on details. The movie could be considered a thinking person's Field of Dreams .