GAMBLING IS STUPID

Over a friendly game of cards last night, some friends of mine and I had a discussion about whether or not No Limit Texas Hold 'Em really counts as gambling. We decided it didn't; it's only a game of chance in the sense that everything in life is as well. True, occasionally you'll get fucked over by the wrong card hitting the board, just like occasionally meteors fall out of the sky and destroy 90% of the organic life on Earth, but hey, shit happens. If you can exert rational control over a game, it's not gambling, and ultimately what you're doing is betting on skill.

This, of course, is why betting on sports is one of the dumbest fucking things imaginable. As a fan, you have no rational control. You can collect all the information you want about West Ham's second-string goalkeeper starting the next match because Robert Green was assassinated (hypothetical, but English people are displeased with that cat), about a point guard not having any cartilage in his knee anymore and his team, ergo, not being as good anymore, or about a star pitcher missing his next start and some dork from the bullpen going instead. You can analyze historical trends about this team beating that team, this player deviating from the mean consistently against this other player, all the livelong day. In the end, no one has any fucking idea what's actually going to happen. Except the players themselves.

Gambling in sports goes back as far as sports do. I'm sure, in Ancient Greece, some shady lookin' dude in a silk toga was giving odds on which naked guy could throw discuses the farthest, Roman shylocks (moar like Venetian Shylocks, amirite?) would give you 2/1 on an over/under of three Christians eaten by the lions, and so forth. But no supposition is necessary when looking back at gambling in the 1910s in baseball. It was an institution.

One of the game's most talented players in the 'teens, a first baseman named Hal Chase, was banned from the game for taking money from gamblers to lose on purpose. And, of course, 70-odd years later, the man with more hits than anyone else in the history of the game, Pete Rose, was banned for life for gambling on baseball. However, neither of these were the most infamous gambling scandal in baseball history. That (dis)honor belongs to the 1919 Chicago White Sox, or as they are more commonly known, the Black Sox.

In 1963, Eliot Asinof published an excellent book about the affair, entitled 8 Men Out, and in 1988, John Sayles' screen adaptation, Eight Men Out, hit theaters. For a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the whole thing, one should read Asinof's book, although Sayles does an excellent job of telescoping everything into a compelling, clear two-hour movie, making one of his best pictures in process.

The story: the 1919 Chicago White Sox clinch the pennant, only to find that their miserly owner, Charles Comiskey, has given them bottles of warm, flat champagne as a bonus. Furthermore, star pitcher Eddie Cicotte (played by the venerable David Straithairn), after winning 29 games, asks Comiskey for a performance-based bonus in his (far-below average salary for the time) contract, since he was benched for two whole weeks, during which he undoubtedly would have won a 30th game. Comiskey tells him only, “29 is not 30, Eddie.”

Since, although he clearly had a gift for arithmetic, Comiskey was a raging fuckface, some of the other players start grumbling about being underpaid. First baseman Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker), an aficionado of nightlife and women who counted gangsters among his casual friends, and shortstop Swede Risberg (who, ironically, was part of a Detroit Tiger team that, in 1917, took money to lose a series to the White Sox that gave the White Sox the title, before later joining the White Sox in a move that was widely regarded as a “thanks for the help” gesture) have a conversation about taking money to lose the World Series, and begin to compile a list of the players they'd need to have in on the scheme for it to work.

Several different groups of gangsters all offer the players money, though the biggest name among them, Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner), wants his name nowhere near any talk of the World Series, lest it affect the odds. Eventually, a core group of involved players met with the various gamblers and agreed to accept a fee of more than each of their salaries for the year to lose to the underdog Cincinnati Reds.

After dutifully losing the first two games, the players still had not been paid (aside from a token “good faith” gift to Eddie Cicotte to get him to lose the first game) and, in any case, the starting pitcher in the third game was golly-gee straight arrow Dickie Kerr, who was not in on the scheme because he was considered a “busher” (read: useless fucktard) who would lose anyway. However, as per the earlier statements about sports and luck, young Kerr pitched a three-hit shutout, and the lower-end gamblers all lost their entire bankroll, thereby screwing the players out of their promised fee. Rothstein himself allegedly even pulled all or most of his money out of the Series at that point; he'd not been wild about betting on the Series in the first place, and as Johnny Caspar said in Miller's Crossing, “if you can't trust a fix, you're left with anarchy.”

The players, pissed off at getting nothing in return for compromising their professional pride, proceeded to turn it around and, for the most part, start kicking ass for the rest of the Series, to the point where game 8 (the series was best 5 out of 9 that year) gangsters of some still-involved party or other were forced to remind starting pitcher Claude Williams of his involvement in the fix by threatening to kill his wife. Williams reluctantly agreed and pitched dreadfully, clinching the series for Cincinnati.

If the events of the previous decade had taught baseball insiders anything, it was how to spot the tell-tale signs of a fix. Otherwise awesome players suddenly playing like shit and occasionally not even bothering to hide deliberate errors was right up at the top of that list. It was thus that journalist Ring Lardner (played by Sayles himself in a fucking brilliant performance) starts going around and asking people, “Yo, what the fuck happened?” (Ed. Note: paraphrase) and eventually starts learning shit about payoffs and so forth.

"I always figured it was talent made a man big, you know, if I was the best at something. I mean, we're the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain't a ballgame. Yeah, but look at who's holding the money and look at who's facing a jail cell. Talent don't mean nothing. And where's Comiskey and Sullivan, Attell, Rothstein? Out in the back room cutting up profits, that's where. That's the damn conspiracy." -David Straithairn, being awesome, as Eddie Cicotte.

The story of the fix ends up going public and the players go on trial for fraud. During this trial, the owners of the 16 Major League teams collectively hire a “Commissioner” to oversee the integrity of the sport, as a public relations move intended to convince the public—who were increasingly like “why the fuck should I give you my money, when it's the 'teens and literally the only people with money are evil white guys in suits, to watch a game whose outcome has already been decided?” and staying away from the ballpark—that baseball could be trusted. (One other by-product of these public-relations freakouts was a forced sale of Boston Red Sox star Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees to maximize his media exposure; don't ask me for a source on that—people who know people have known that's how that happened for 90 years now.) However, the man the owners approach, judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, insists on absolute power and a lifetime contract, to which the owners, backed into a corner, agree.

What Landis does is, in spite of the players being acquitted of fraud and there being no hard evidence that any of them actually took any money, unilaterally decide to ban all eight accused players from the game for life. And so, in order to protect the public images of the men who forced them into a terrible ethical compromise by not paying them a living wage, the Black Sox were summarily exiled from the game and forced to stand for eternity as avatars of corruption and greed.

The movie doesn't have time to get into what a fucking asshole Landis actually was, nor how hypocritically he enforced his dictum, as outlined in the movie, that “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes, or promises to throw a game, no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ball game are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it will ever play professional baseball again,” nor the fact that the ban against black players in the major leagues was single-handedly enforced by Landis during his quarter-century reign of terror, over the protests of baseball men like Branch Rickey (who, a year after Landis' death, signed Jackie Robinson less as a great blow for civil rights than as a “fuck you” to Landis, and was always annoyed that he was deprived of a good three or four prime years of Robinson's Dodger career due to Landis' racism). So I'll do it here. While Sayles does a pretty good job of establishing Landis as a mean, cold, selfish, and cruel man, knowing what a truly bad person Kenesaw Mountain Landis actually was makes those scenes in the third act that much more powerful. Landis would ban other players for gambling, like Phil Douglas, Jimmy O'Connell, Gene Paulette, Hal Chase, and Heinie Zimmerman, on hearsay testimony (well, except Chase, but Hal Chase was so fuckin dirty it's amazing he was never killed, let alone banned). However, confronted with iron-clad proof that stars (and, parenthetically, members of the Ku Klux Klan) Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker had thrown games in 1919, Landis granted them amnesty due to it being “old news” and for Cobb and Speaker's services to the game. Riiiiiight. Funny how the only people he ever banned aside from the Black Sox were people no one had ever heard of (again, excluding Chase, who was mostly only famous for being dirty). And funny how those guys shared membership in a certain secret white-sheeted organization as Landis . . . oh, wait, sorry. That's never been proven (in Landis' case), and it could besmirch his reputation. How's your own medicine taste, you fucking disgrace?

Anyway, sorry 'bout that little digression. As I was starting to say before thinking about Kenesaw Mountain Landis for more than two seconds made me start spitting blood (as it does), one of the problems with Eight Men Out is that, unless the viewer already knows the story the movie tells, the emotional impact of certain aspects of it might be muted somewhat. The first example, discussed above, is just how fucked up sturmbannfuhrer Landis' decision to ban the players without proof really was. The decision, made on behalf of the owners who paid Landis' salary, had very little to do with gambling, instead motivated by ticket sales and the desire to artificially enforce a below-market-value level for players' salaries (hey, at least we don't have that problem anymore!) If the real story got out—that an owner was paying his players so little that they couldn't afford medical care for severe chronic pain in the shoulder and elbow, like Eddie Cicotte, or forced to live in slum neighborhoods despite generating massive profits for the owner—a public increasingly interested in radical and progressive politics might not be so happy. (Sayles touches on this briefly in the movie, as Ring Lardner, when he grumbles, “If Landis is serious about cleaning up the game, he should start with those birds [the owners] up there on the steps with him.”) The bitterest irony of the Black Sox' fate was that, after the desperate measures to which they resorted to make some extra cash, the fact that Babe Ruth (whose own boozes-and-whores private life was the subject of a league-mandated press blackout) publicly flaunted the fact that his salary was higher than the the President of the United States meant that it was harder to underpay star players, which had a hell of a lot more to do with the end of gambling scandals than fear of Landis did.

Still, in spite of the fact that there's only so much historical context you can pack into a two-hour movie, Sayles pulls off Eight Men Out with flair. He deliberately looked for actors who could actually play baseball, so the baseball scenes are a lot cooler than they usually are in movies (much as I love Bull Durham, for instance, Tim Robbins looks like a fucking moron trying to throw a baseball), including one awesome take where D.B. Sweeney, as Shoeless Joe Jackson, whacks the fuck out of a ball and legs out a triple while the camera keeps both him and the ball in frame for the whole uninterrupted duration of his trip to third, culminating in a dramatic slide. David Straithairn, unsurprisingly because David Straithairn is fucking awesome, even throws a fairly convincing knuckleball (which causes Studs Terkel, playing Sayles' grizzled, cigar-chomping colleague Huey—boy those two are a fucking team in this movie—to come in his pants: “Did you see that pitch?” and have it not be patently ridiculous). And of course, Charlie Sheen, who demonstrated similarly impressive baseball playing skills in Major League, does some cool shit as outfielder Happy Felsch.

The cast, as befits a movie about a team said in its day to be comprised of all-stars, is a massive collection of talent. A lot of them, unfortunately, have been forgotten and/or slept on as time passes. Of course, there's David Straithairn, who I will literally defend to the death (do not force me to prove I know what the word literally means, people), but holy shit . . . Michael Lerner? What the fuck happened to Michael Lerner? He was killing shit in the late 80s and early 90s, not only in this, but in Harlem Nights (it's possible to be good in a bad movie, just ask Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, and Danny Aiello, to name three more examples from the same cast), Barton Fink (genuflect RIGHT FUCKING NOW) . . . and then a whole lotta nothing for a really long time (though him turning up as “Mayor Ebert” in Roland Emmerich's Godzilla was, aside from some random thing Jean Reno did, the only cool thing in that picture) until showing up in the awesome Ralph Macchio web short “Wax On, Fuck Off.” Apparently he's in the movie they made of Atlas Shrugged, which makes me facepalm and want to make some phone calls making sure he's not getting fucked over by people who think he's the Michael Lerner who edits Tikkun.

In spite of the presence of these two titans (and oh, man, is David Straithairn amazing in that scene where he's giving the deposition and he goes, “We were crooked . . . we were crooked.” The power of the shame and self-loathing he invests in those three words, fuck me, that's what this acting thing is all about right there) the best performance in the movie might be John Mahoney as earnest, guileless manager Kid Gleason. It's hard in a cynical, self-aware era, to seem like anything other than a dipshit playing someone who genuinely believes in purity, but John Mahoney is so good in this that he will seriously make you want a glass of milk, a slice of apple pie, and a fucking American flag to salute. When he's in court and the asshole lawyer asks him what he thinks of his players, John Mahoney fights with it—you can tell the fact they might have profaned his beloved game upsets him—but ultimately he firms up his jaw, looks the guy right in the eye and says, “I think they're the best. Period.” And the whole courtroom erupts in applause. THAT'S FUCKING LOYALTY, GODDAMMIT! That's how you roll as man, an actual man, not some macho penisface. Te salud, baby.

There's also, in the massive cast, one of the best John Cusack performances ever as Buck Weaver, the only member of the eight who not only never went to any of the meetings about the fix, but refused to accept money (Shoeless Joe Jackson apparently was handed an envelope with money in it, but no one could ever prove he really understood what it was for, especially since he busted his ass the whole Series, hit almost .400 and had the Series' only home run) and who spent the rest of his life quixotically trying to clear his name. Then there's Christopher Lloyd, who's almost unrecognizable because he's not overacting. And of course, Sayles and Turkel, as a sportswriter version of Statler and Waldorf.

In spite of its showing that the Black Sox, for the most part, were either naïve, dumb, or in Weaver and Jackson's case, falsely accused, Eight Men Out still serves as a cautionary tale about gambling, but not in the way baseball traditionalists would have you believe. The kind of old fart who gets all misty-eyed by the very mention of Wrigley or Ebbets Field, or Stan Musial, or bunting, or playing catch with his dad/son would get all huffy and start declaiming about the purity of the sport, but fuck that shit in the ear. Sports isn't pure, it's a metaphor for either gladiatorial combat (individual sports) or war (team sports). It's one guy or bunch of guys (of any gender) against another guy or bunch of guys. Athletes are not heroes, they're guys who are good at sports. This is why people like John Sayles should make more sports movies, because his characters are always people, and his worlds (even in Brother From Another Planet) are recognizably grounded in the real.

So where, you may ask, is the cautionary tale about gambling? In the cruelty and capriciousness that their fate is decided, the players show that, even if you actually win (which they kind of did, getting acquitted in court), you still shouldn't gamble, because the element of chance (sturmbannfuhrer Landis) loves the taste of ass, specifically yours, and will randomly bite you in it when you gamble. Sure, the natural perversity of the universe makes the very act of waking up in the morning a gamble, but you shouldn't push your luck. Like Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the universe, but if you play blackjack against that motherfuckin' gonif you're a farkakte putz.”