Off Day of the Damned

What is up with an off day already?

Like a good little joiner and despite the fact that I was not in town, I watched 8 Men Out around the same time the event was happening at the Revue Cinema.

I haven't seen this film in years and had the suspicion that I've actually never seen it. It struck me mostly how innocent the times were. The players were payed peanuts (and flat champagne), the clubhouse looks like a dungeon, the star player is illiterate.

The other issue that stands out is that despite the fact that there are very good actors in it (hello there, David Strathairn), it just isn't a very good movie. It sort of meanders through the story and I didn't care past being a baseball fan and knowing I should care. It might have been better to either focus on the organized crime aspect of it (this was Chicago, after all) or focused on the aftermath of it or some sort of combination of the two. Or maybe picked one player to focus on. Probably either Eddie Cicotte (Straithairn) who won 29 games and was benched because Comiskey had promised him $10,000 bonus if he won 30 games or Buck Weaver (John Cusack) who was named but denied until his death he was involved in the fix.

The on field stuff, where they show the players actually throwing the game, looks silly and because they are all in the same costumes, they all look the same. Who is in on it? Who isn't? Who is that guy? It would be less of a baseball movie, but a better movie.

The lines drawn between this scandal and the more recent steroid scandal are obvious, but here is the major difference between them. Baseball players in 1919, at least according to this film, were underpaid, and were motivated to cheat because they wanted to punish the crooked owners. The vast majority of the players named in the Mitchell Report are not the highest paid stars, but rather journey men types that are trying to get an edge to get a job, keep a job, make some money.

But this is where someone like Alex Rodriguez becomes interesting as a character study. He is in possession of the greatest natural gifts and is already rich beyond imagining, and yet he still cheated. You can't compare the scandal of 1919 with the scandal of the first decade of the 21st century because the game is an entirely different animal.