2015 Blind Spot Series: Eight Men Out

Ever since I can remember, April means the arrival of baseball. Lately, it also means the arrival of allergies, but that's not why we're here. America's Past Time is. I'm a huge fan with a register of magic numbers in my head to prove it: 755, 714, 61, 56, .406, 1.12, 4191, 4256, 2130, etc. Thanks to baseball, I excelled at math in school. It's also given me many of my favorite sports memories. Of course I've read a number of books, short stories, magazine articles, poems that deal with the subject in some capacity. Therefore, it's no surprise that I've come across the game's most infamous scandal a time or two. What is surprising is that I've never seen the movie based on it. That made it a no-brainer to include Eight Men Out on my Blind Spot List for 2015. Yes, I always knew I would watch this in April.

For the uninitiated, Eight Men Out recounts the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. A number of players on the team, actually called the White Sox, successfully conspired to intentionally the World Series that year at the urging of some shady characters with lots of money. Everyone found guilty of the offense was banned for life from Major League Baseball. Nearly 100 years later, they still have not been reinstated. The movie looks at the transpiring events mostly through the eyes of the players involved. It's a wise choice helping to blur the lines between the heroes and villains, good and evil, needs and wants. We get to see life from the perspective of early 20th century athletes. They weren't the highly compensated performers we're used to hearing about today. These guys struggled to make ends meet, traveled endlessly by train and bus, and in a time before unions, had the size of their paychecks, and whether they were getting them at all, completely dependent on the whims of the team owners. The movie did an excellent job making us understand that the players were every bit as blue-collar as the people who plunked down their hard earned cash to see them play. This creates empathy within the viewer. We understand that these aren't a pack of greedy men trying to add to their already towering piles of money. These are people trying to provide for their families and tired of not receiving fair wages.

The portrayal of these men is uniformly excellent. John Cusack gives a confident performance as Buck Weaver. He commands our attention whenever he's on the screen. Clifton James turns in a bombastic portrayal of team owner Charles Comiskey. Michael Rooker, Christopher Lloyd, and Don Harvey are all excellent, as well. The cast also includes a young Charlie Sheen, but he isn't given much to do. Regardless of any of this, it's the work of David Strathairn as grizzled veteran pitcher Eddie Cicotte that anchors the movie. Through him, we never lose sight of the fact that the players are going through a moral dilemma. On the one hand, they want to make money and stick it to a team owner who has been less than magnanimous. On the other, they are actively destroying the integrity of the game they love, thumbing their noses at the spirit of competition. Strathairn's Cicotte struggles with this and only agrees to be part of the fix after trying to wrangle the money he felt he deserved from Comiskey. All the while, he's a man fighting against himself. We understand and even agree with him whenever he's on board and those times when he's not.

Eight Men Out tells its story in three distinct parts. The first shows us the players assembling their ranks and making the decision to actually throw the games. The last turns into a courtroom drama as the players are put on trial for their indiscretions against the game. Both of these sections work pretty well , but neither is truly exceptional. What is special is the sprawling mid-section of the film which shows the World Series itself. Remember, those that are participating aren't the only members of the team. Others don't know what's going, at first anyway, and are truly giving their best efforts in hopes of winning. This gives the movie it's most tense moments as we see the team tearing itself apart from the inside due to the two different agendas within the lockerroom. This is exacerbated by the fact that the gangsters don't always come through with the payments as promised and provide the threat of violence if things don't go according to plan. This is where the movie makes its bones as a truly excellent baseball movie. I'm not sure how well it plays to those not familiar with the sport, or this particular story, but for this fan it works very well.

As promised, here is your daily link to Brittani's site since she won the Spot thw Movie Titles Contest over the weekend.

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