He’d put on fifty pounds and the spring was gone from his step, but he could still hit. “My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name. Ğliot Asinof, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series
There were, of course, more subtle techniques for controlling ball games. The victims had no chance to appeal: there was nothing in the rules to cover such behavior. On another, a marksman prevented a fielder from chasing a long hit by peppering the ground around his feet with bullets. On one occasion, a gambler actually ran out on the field and tackled a ballplayer. An outfielder, settling under a crucial fly ball, would find himself stoned by a nearby spectator, who might win a few hundred dollars if the ball was dropped. There was hardly a game in which some wild, disruptive incident did not occur to alter the outcome.
“Though rising in popularity, baseball became corrupted with almost incredible rapidity. Here, too, is a graphic picture of the American underworld that managed the fix, the deeply shocked newspapermen who uncovered the story, and the war-exhausted nation that turned with relief and pride to the Series, only to be rocked by the scandal.įar more than a superbly told baseball story, this is a compelling slice of American history in the aftermath of World War I and at the cusp of the Roaring Twenties. Moving behind the scenes, he perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. The headlines proclaimed the 1919 fix of the World Series and attempted cover-up as "the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America!" Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation's leading gamblers to throw the Series in Cincinnati. First published in 1963, Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out has become a timeless classic of a scandalous world series.
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