Eight Men Out

This is the DVD Eight Men Out. This movie stars John Cusack, Charlie Sheen, and D.B. Sweeney.

This is the story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox who threw the World Series. The team is owned by Charles Comiskey, a penny pinching skin flint who spends lavishly cultivating the media, while underpaying his players and forcing some star players to sit down for weeks at a time so they can't make performance bonuses.

Into this mix come a couple of second rate gamblers who propose a scheme to a number of star players. That scheme being that two starring pitchers and a few skilled position players could control the outcome of the games.

As the players begin to accept the concept, the idea of fixing the World Series goes up the criminal food chain and becomes controlled by the notorious book maker and gambler, Abe Rothstein. The players who wanted to get back at a cheap owner, became pawns to a greater evil.

This movie is particularly important to me because the White Sox are the team I have followed all my life.  A team with very little success in it's history.  A team which under different circumstances (a better owner) would have had a team, the 1919 White Sox, that rivaled the 1927 Yankees, as one of the best teams in baseball history.

I find this to be an excellent movie, an entertaining look into the history of baseball.