The Black Sox

I read Eliot Asinoff's Eight Men Out many years ago and enjoyed John Sayles 1988 movie based on the book.  Over the years, I've become aware of the many inaccuracies in both.  Asinoff and Sayles were both sympathetic to the plight of the eight Chicago White Sox players who threw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, becoming known as the infamous Black Sox. In their telling, Charles Comiskey, the Sox owner, was the bad guy who drove the players to take payoffs from gamblers.

Several years ago, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) published Eight Myths about the Black Sox, along with an exhaustive appendix of the significant, and not so significant, errors and omissions in the book and movie. 

To give you a flavor this is the first of the myths:

This is the central thesis of Eight Men Out: Charles Comiskey’s “ballplayers were the best and were paid as poorly as the worst,” as Eliot Asinof wrote. That couldn’t be further from the truth. We can’t climb into the heads of the Black Sox to know exactly why they threw the World Series. But the players themselves rarely claimed, as Asinof did, that it was because of Comiskey’s low salaries or poor treatment — and we now have accurate salary information to back that up. Newly available organizational contract cards at the National Baseball Hall of Fame show that the White Sox’s Opening Day payroll of $88,461 was more than $11,500 higher than that of the National League champion Reds, and several of the Black Sox players were among the highest-paid at their positions. If they did feel resentment at their salaries under the reserve-clause system, so did players from 15 other major-league teams. The scandal was much more complex than disgruntled players trying to get back at the big, bad boss. 

You can find the 8 Myths here and the detailed appendix here. 

With the proliferation of sports gambling sites and their active promotion during the broadast of sporting events I fear we will eventually have another huge scandal like the Black Sox.