Say It Ain’t So, Joe! John Sayles’ “Eight Men Out”

Baseball is America’s game. That’s its reputation, anyway—as a wholesome family entertainment in which athletes face off against one another at a sporting event that’s easy to watch and enjoy.

 The fact that the players’ faces aren’t covered is one reason that baseball seems to be the favorite team sport of moviemakers. So’s the basic set-up of the game. There’s no scrum of heavily padded guys smashing into another clump of players, similarly outfitted, with the spectator desperately trying to locate the pigskin and figure out who is who. Instead, in baseball, one solitary soul on the pitcher’s mound rhythmically faces down one batsman at a time. A man with a ball versus a man with a bat: what could simpler or more dramatic? 

 That’s got to be at least part of the reason why there are so many baseball movies. Some are lively and pure fun, like 1949’s Take Me Out to the Ballgame and 1958’s Damn Yankees, both of them star-studded musicals. Some are heartwarming biopics about baseball greats, like The Pride of the Yankees (1942, about Lou Gehrig) and several films focusing on major league baseball’s first Black player, Jackie Robinson. (See 1950’s The Jackie Robinson Story, in which Robinson played himself, and 2013’s 42, starring Chadwick Boseman.) Baseball takes on an almost mythic significance in The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), and Field of Dreams (1985). In the last of these, a young farmer in search of a father figure builds his own ballfield and greets the ghostly Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with the other disgraced members of the Chicago White Sox, who were banished from the sport forever for their part in fixing the 1919 World Series.

 Writer/director John Sayles has never much gone in for simple projects. Though his films over the years can be sorted into many genres, he seems to particularly appreciate American history, as seen on a broad canvas. In 1987, he won wide critical acclaim for Matewan, the often-brutal story of West Virginia coal miners overcoming obstacles to form a union. One year later, he directed an ensemble of major Hollywood actors (including John Cusack, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, and Charlie Sheen) in the story of what is often called the Black Sox Scandal. Eight Men Out details how, in an era when betting on baseball games was rampant, members of the pennant-winning Chicago White Sox were approached by mobster types to throw the series, in exchange for promises of hefty payments. What made Sayles’ screenwriting complicated is that, no one, including baseball historians, has the whole story. We don’t exactly know who-all was in on the fix, nor who agreed, and then eventually changed his mind. What we DO know is that there were many bad guys around, including mobsters, greedy players, and a team owner (Charles Comiskey) so cheap that some players apparently agreed to throw World Series games as a way of getting back at a boss-man who promised them bonuses but never paid up.  And we know that eight players were eventually prosecuted, including at least one (Buck Weaver, played by Cusack) who deplored the idea of playing to lose, but never squealed on his teammates.

 Sayles takes it all on: the players, the crooks, the management, the sportswriters who smelled a rat. (He himself appears as journalist Damon Runyon, and the great Studs Terkel plays another sportswriter of the day.) Sayles has also got the little urchin who looks up at his former hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and cries out, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Very mythic; very moving.