Capitalist Exploitation
Make no mistake: the villains of this movie are not the White Sox players that cheated or were accused of cheating or possibly cheated or merely have gone down in history as being cheaters. The villain here is Charles Comiskey, owner of the team. While falling short of actually condoning any cheating that actually was done by some members of the infamous “Black Sox” team, the prevailing theme is that they merely did what they had to do in order to get what their owner would not give them: full due and fair pay for turning in an impeccable season of ballplay. Comiskey actively sought to deny bonuses, failed to come through on promise rewards and at every turn took advantage of the revenue his players produced for him without even coming close to providing them a fair and equitable distribution based on their labor. Eight Men Out becomes a textbook case of Marxist concepts like worker alienation, exploitation of the working class by the ownership class and the ultimate result that Marx predicted when those worker become enlightened: rebellion and insurrection.
Illusion versus Reality
The 1919 World Series has been historically determined to have been thrown by the Chicago White Sox because the eight men who were kicked out of the game allegedly underperformed. “Shoeless” Joe Jackson is the most infamous member of the Black Sox to have his career ended by the scandal. His regular season batting average in 1919 was .351 while in the World Series it was .375; the highest of any player on either team who appeared in all eight games. On the other hand, Eddie Cicotte had a 1.82 ERA during the regular season that inflated to 2.19 in the three game he pitched for the Sox in the Series. Both Cicotte and Shoeless Joe played their last major league of their respective careers in the 1919 World Series. If Jackson could put up those kinds of numbers of when underperforming in order to throw the Series, imagine what he might have done if he’d come to play. The reality is undeniable: Cicotte cheated and Jackson did not. Judge Kennesaw Landis, the first Commission of Major League Baseball installed by his friends the owners following the scandal, not only ignored a jury’s decision absolving Jackson and most others, but he ignored baseball’s holy scripture as well: the statistics. The illusion had been created that Jackson and Cicotte and the other six players were all guilty and all on the same level of guilt whereas the evidence utterly refutes that conclusion. The fix WAS in, and not just on the baseball field, but high in the corporate offices.
Individualism v. Teamwork
More than any other team sport, baseball also qualifies as one in which a single individual can control the outcome. Although all the players on the field are a collective that must be counted upon to work cohesively, if one batter is having a great night or one pitcher is throwing his best stuff, the final score can be determined by just one single player. No other team sport is so unreservedly at the mercy of a single player. This tension between the potential for one or two or five or six or eight players out of twenty-five to determine the outcome of four or five games out of seven or nine played against just other team is what really drives the narrative. How do you get an entire team—a fantastically successful team—to collapse in a believable way that does not draw attention without enlisting all twenty-five players? Such is the conundrum facing the gamblers who approach the White Sox, the players who don’t want to have split the payoff 25 ways, the jury selected to determine if any wrongdoing occurred and Major League Baseball owners who now have to worry whether it could happen again.
