Hoopla

"This book is really overlooked. It deals with the Black Sox scandal in 1919. There is a very good nonfiction book called Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof which deals with the same subject. So this book was kind of lost, particularly when John Sayles made his film of Eight Men Out , which is one of my favourite baseball movies. Some of the players from The Chicago White Sox accepted money from gamblers to throw the World Series, which is why they were then referred to as the Black Sox. In the end, through threats and whatever, they lost the series to the Cincinnati Reds and eight of the players were banned for life by the new commissioner of baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The White Sox at the time were considered the best team in baseball by far. It’s also one of the themes of WP Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe , which got made into the movie Field of Dreams. Shoeless Joe Jackson was the best player on that Black Sox team. Harry Stein’s novel is told from two points of view. One point of view is a fictional journalist, Luther Pond, who provides the backdrop to the corrupt nature of baseball – and Chicago – in those days. The other chapters are narrated by Buck Weaver, who was one of the players on the team. Although he didn’t throw any games himself, he was barred from baseball because he knew about it and didn’t tell anyone. Not game-fixing, but there is the whole issue of steroid abuse. Some things never change within the sport. The money is a lot bigger these days, so gamblers couldn’t really afford to make it worthwhile. The cheating that still goes on in baseball is sometimes referred to as gamesmanship. Taking steroids wasn’t against the rules of the game, but it is against the spirit of the game – and against the law, of course, without a prescription. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think baseball is the only sport in America where we still consider the spirit of the game to be important. When the British say “it‘s not cricket”, that is that same idea. No-one would ever say anything is against the spirit of American football. In the film Field of Dreams there is a speech delivered by James Earl Jones about how baseball stands for everything good in American life. But he is saying it about a bunch of guys that threw the World Series! So there is a certain contradiction that Kinsella and the movie makers never came to terms with. This is brought out by Harry Stein, who is something of a contrarian writer. He wrote a very interesting book a few years later about how he became a right-wing Republican after growing up a leftist, and that attitude is what gives this book a certain edge."