Plot Summary

Anxious to burn the team's owner--whose skinflint tactics insult their talent--eight players on the Chicago White Sox conspire with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series.

Unlike other nostalgic baseball films, director John Sayles's Eight Men Out explores one of the darkest moments in the history of the sport--1919's infamous Black Sox scandal, when eight players on the heavily favored Chicago White Sox agreed to throw the World Series. Based on Eliot Asinof's 1963 book of the same name, the film investigates why the players--including the great Shoeless Joe Jackson, who many believe belongs in the Hall of Fame--would purposely lose the most important game of their lives. Set in the same time period as Sayles's Matewan, Eight Men Out shows how money and exploitative labor conditions destroy the purity of the game. Even though the film has no star parts and ends on a bleak note, Eight Men Out was the second Sayles film to receive financing from a major studio. Studs Terkel appears as the famous journalist Hugh Fullerton, who exposes the scandal, while Asinof and Sayles also have small roles.