This year marks the centennial of the crooked World Series, or perhaps I should say ‘the crooked World Series we know about’
I suppose I will always have time for John Sayles’s movie Eight Men Out , which tells the story of the “Black Sox” baseball scandal of 1919. Sayles is a tough, cynical guy who has an old-left view of history. His movie was made with affection for the game, and care in its depiction. His ballplayers are craftsmen plying a trade, not saints or comic-book underdogs.
His book invents dialogue for scenes he had no living witness for, which is obvious to the reader and frankly confessed. His fans also knew from interviews and other books that Asinof had invented one major plot point to trap plagiarists — “Harry F.”, the Arnold Rothstein thug who threatens pitcher Lefty Williams in order the clinch the fix in the deciding game after the players rebel.
When Asinof set out to write his Black Sox book, there were few principals in the story left alive, and only two — the boxer-gambler Abe Attell and the crooked White Sox outfielder Happy Felsch — were willing to talk. For Asinof, this was plenty to work with. But the naked greed of a few shifty ballplayers would not, on its own, make for much of a tragedy. A novelist had to give them a real justification for throwing the World Series.
In 2002, Major League Baseball gave the Hall of Fame library a long-secret archive of “salary cards” from big-league teams dating back to 1912. Researchers Bob Hoie and Mike Haupert studied these and were able to reconstruct the salary distribution of the major leagues, including the Black Sox. We now know that Comiskey’s Sox had the highest overall payroll in the majors in 1919, earning much more than their Series opponents from Cincinnati.
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