Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series – Eliot Asinof

In the summer of 1919, the Chicago White Sox were the toast of the American League, winning the pennant by 3.5 games and becoming the easy favorite to win the World Series, their second in 3 years.  However, a few things stood in the way of the crowning of a budding dynasty: a conspiracy of two-timing, low level gamblers, a tight-fisted owner who would spare no expense for reporters and friends but would cheat his team out of bonuses, and the players who were fed up with being paid like paupers despite their success.  The end result was the first World Series victory for the Reds, a black eye for baseball, and the decimation of the White Sox organization, who would not win another World Series until the following century.

Eight Men Out is author Eliot Asinof’s tale of the whole scandal, from the agreement to throw the Series, the fallout throughout the following season, the prosecution of the 8 co-conspirators, and how they lived out their life, banned from the game they loved and the not able to use the only skill that they had.  Released in 1963, Asinof’s account had always been accepted as the one true source on how the scandal went down.  Recent research has shown that this may not be the case, with Asinof himself admitting that certain characters, and their actions, had been made up in order to protect his movie rights and independent research showing that stories of Charles Comiskey’s alledged stinginess may be apocraphyl.  That said, Asinof does provide a gripping tale of how the fix was put in place and how the players ended up being the big losers, cheated of their promised payday, facing trial over the whole ordeal and banned for life from baseball.

I first read (or started to read) this book in junior high, around the time of the movie’s release.  I picked the book up within the last few years and finally got around to it, following the (non-scandalous) collapse of yet another White Sox team.  The stain of this scandal rocked the White Sox for years, leaving them out of the post-season for 40 years and putting an awful 88 years between championships when they finally broke through and won the 2005 World Series.  There are still some scars that likely can be attributed to the Black Sox scandal.  To this day, the White Sox remain the only pre-expansion team to not make the post-season in consecutive years.  The 1920 squad was within striking distance of first place and had a good shot at a return trip to the World Series had their star players not been suspended prior to the last series of the season.  90 plus years later, they are still looking for that back-to-back trip to the playoffs.