When the team that couldn't be beat threw the World Series in 1919 they did more than deliberately lose a few baseball games; they corrupted the National Pastime and ushered the sport out of its age of innocence. Writer director John Sayles succeeds in showing exactly how and why eight players on the best team in baseball set in motion what had to be one of the most poorly conceived, organized and executed conspiracies in the whole history of graft, and in his usual role as a champion of the working class portrays the guilty players as victims of money-grubbing corporate exploitation (represented both by team management and organized crime).

But it's all the cynical wheeling and dealing behind the Black Sox scandal which make the film so fascinating. The story might have been unbelievable if it wasn't entirely true, but like any aspect of real life the details are messy and inconclusive. Most of the film recounts the mechanics of the fix; events during the subsequent exposure and trial are telescoped too quickly into the final forty minutes or so, which makes sense: in any conspiracy the crime is always more interesting than the punishment.

It helps to be at least slightly familiar with the huge cast of characters involved: players, gamblers, reporters and so forth. A few scenes have been added for dramatic unity, and others were abbreviated to maintain a consistent pace, but all the facts are there, and Sayles manages to pull them all together in an entertaining history lesson from our collective adolescence, re-creating that fateful moment when the boys of summer grew up for good.

It has been just over 100 years since this real life scandal took place in professional baseball, and while it has been pretty much forgotten, there was definitely an impact made because of what occurred. There had been movies made about Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, and their lives are well remembered as well as their accomplishments. But this doesn't just deal with one player. It deals with an entire team, the 1919 Chicago White Sox.

The scandal mixes organized crime in with the financial mistreatment of the team which leads them to make a deal with the devil, Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner in a great part),fraud involving the World Series. Owner Clifton James may be unaware of the fraud, but he's equally as responsible because his greediness prompted teammates to purposely throw the series against the Cincinnati Reds. One of the teammates, John Cusack, is uninvolved in the fraud, but is made guilty simply because he's a teammate and evidence points at him that he is guilty.

A good featured cast includes such familiar actors as Charlie Sheen, Christopher Lloyd, Barbara Garrick, D. B. Sweeney and John Mahoney. The film gets more interesting as it really gets into the major plot, but there's a lot of seller. The impact what happens is shown as to how it affects each of the players, particularly Cusack. Of course baseball historians are going to be the most interested in this, but it's also good from a historical standpoint as well. Just a little too long for my taste. A good 20 minutes could have been cut out.

One of the best baseball films ever made was about the sport's darkest hour, the fixing of the 1919 World Series. Eight of the heavily favored members of the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series as a result of payoffs and bigger promises of payoffs to gambling interests. In the background of those interests was the notorious Arnold Rothstein who was never brought to trial. The eight players were the Eight Men Out, banned for life by the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis played here most impressively by John Anderson. Anderson even looks like Landis.

The whole unvarnished truth is laid out there, owner Charles Comiskey a pioneer owner in the American League who treated his players like field hands as he assiduously courted the press and through them the fans. A little more generous with the profits this story might never have occurred. Clifton James plays the greedy and rapacious Comiskey. The incident where Eddie Cicotte is not started so that Comiskey can save on a promised bonus if he pitched and won 30 games has come down in legend. Cicotte and Lefty Williams played by David Strathairn and James Read were the key to the conspiracy. They lost the five games in that best five out of nine series to the Reds to throw the series. The bad play in the field by the others insured the result.

Two things that are not mentioned in the film, but are very important; viewers ought to know. The best pitcher the White Sox had was Hall of Famer Urban 'Red' Faber who had led the team to a World Series win in 1917, the last one they would have until 2005. Faber came up injured and was disabled and was not available to pitch in the 1919 series. Had he stayed honest and not been injured, the result might have been different.

Eddie Collins the second baseman was played here by Bill Irwin and what's not mentioned here is that Collins started out with Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, part of his fabled $100,000.00 infield. When Mack broke up his team and sold off the players in 1941-1915, Collins got a guaranteed salary of $15,000.00, way above what his teammates were getting. Collins was one of Mack's favorites and he got that salary guaranteed for him by Comiskey before parting with him. That caused a lot of the jealousy you see portrayed in Eight Men Out.

The real ringleaders were shortstop Swede Risberg and first baseman Chick Gandil as is shown here. They roped the others in. They're played by Don Harvey and Michael Rooker.

The two that come down to us as the biggest tragedies are John Cusack as Buck Weaver and D.B. Sweeney as Shoeless Joe Jackson. Weaver knew about the fix, but would not rat out his teammates, hoping they'd come around and play on the square. He was treated as if he were a conspirator himself and suffered the same banishment.

As for Shoeless Joe Jackson, his lifetime average of .356 and the fact that he is one of the select group of .400 hitters would put him in the Hall of Fame. During the teen years he was overshadowed by Ty Cobb in the American League, but in the Twenties might have come into his own. He showed signs of adapting to the lively ball era that Babe Ruth was just inaugurating.

He was also illiterate and was easily manipulated into the fix. Despite that his play like Weaver's was outstanding in that series, he hit the only home run recorded by either side in that next to last series of the dead ball era. What you see with D.B. Sweeney is exactly how poor Jackson was.

Baseball like other sports is a business and some of those businessmen are greedy indeed. Sad that it was the players who paid the ultimate price to clean up the sport in the mind of the public. Eight Men Out captures the era and mood of the times and even non-sports fans will enjoy this film immensely.