Skip to main content

The Fix

By

"Shoeless Joe" Jackson in 1919 World Series
It never ceases to amaze me how films garner a certain dignity over time.  It was 25 years ago when Field of Dreams came out.  Kevin Costner was America's golden boy fresh off the highly successful film, Bull Durham, a much better baseball movie.  But, it was this "shaggy doggerel" of a story which was nominated for Best Picture of 1989.  Fortunately, it didn't win, but Costner found his mark the following year in Dances with Wolves, in which he traded the corn fields of Iowa for the Dakota plains.

I guess everyone loves a redemption story.  In this case, Ray Kinsella (Costner) has a dream in which he is compelled to build a baseball field for the infamous Chicago "Black Sox" who threw the 1919 World Series.  Of course, everyone thinks Kinsella is crazy but his wife sticks by him as he plows over the corn field and starts building his ball park, all because the voice in his head told him, "if you build it, they will come." Sure enough they do, if only in his fevered imagination with the White Sox given a chance to win back the series from the Cincinnati Reds.

The movie was based on a novel by W.P. Kinsella a few years earlier, who no doubt had read Eliot Asinof's classic account, Eight Men Out, which told the history of the World Series scandal.  But neither Kinsella nor the filmmakers deal much in the particulars of the case, but rather some cornball metaphysical tale in which these guys get the chance to replay the World Series.

The White Sox were a sure bet to win the series, which is why the Chicago mob decided to get to the players, and swing the series to the Cincinnati Reds with the much higher betting odds.  Asinof illustrates that it didn't take much to throw a game.  A missed catch here, a miffed swing there made all the difference in the world, and the mob and players involved considered the slights undetectable.  However, Ring Lardner, who covered the Sox, smelled something was amiss.  "The Fix" was eventually ratted out. Eight players stood accused of throwing the series, including "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, who many felt wasn't involved.  He became the central player in Kinsella's novel, and played by Ray Liotta in the movie.

All the players involved were banned from baseball for life, but that didn't mean they couldn't redeem themselves after death.  The quasi-religious theme sat better with the audience than did John Sayles' independent movie, Eight Men Out, the year before.  This film seems to be mostly remembered by baseball fans, despite a great cast that included John Cusack, Christopher Lloyd and David Strathairn.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more