Just watched We Are Marshall

This isn't aimed at you, novelist, but I absolutely HATE going to a movie with someone who read the book the movie is based on... Being a dinosaur geek since I was able to read, I was totally pumped for Jurassic Park. My girlfriend at the time had read the book and did nothing but bitch the entire movie about how it wasn't like the book...

*Sigh*

 

To be fair, Jurassic Park was a helluva good book.

 

I did a report in a History of American Sports class -- we watched movies and analyzed them (greatest class ever) -- and I did a report on the Blacksox Scandal. A couple weeks later, I sit down in class, and on comes "Eight Men Out." I'd never seen it before. Even with all the common knowledge I had stored over the years and with all the information I gathered from doing the report, I still learned about the ongoings from the movie. That's quality.

 

Rudy. Rudy. Rudy. Rudy.

 

Hopefully you didn't learn that Cicotte was promised a bonus for winning 30 games and Comiskey benched him. 8)

That didn't happen. Not even close.

 

To be honest, I only saw the movie that one time. It's a movie I always say I'm going to buy when I see it ... but I never think to actually look for it. It was the only movie shown in that course -- and there were other good ones -- that I walked away saying, "Wow."

What I did take from it, though, was how much those players really hated Comiskey. And my grandpa used to tell me stories upon stories about Shoeless Joe, but he never mentioned left out the court case/ruling. It was just cool to see everything that went down -- how he was bullied into making his mark and such. I wonder how much of that movie was Hollywood, though.

 

The movie followed the book very, very well.

The problem is: the book was written like a novel rather than a meticulous, academic treating of the scandal. So Asinof included some stories that are likely accurate but have have never been corroborated (such as Williams' wife being threatened) -- and others that have just plain been debunked (such as Comiskey's payroll being the lowest in the league; in fact, he had one of the three highest -- around $90-95K.)

Asinof got the major parts right, and he was the first to really put the whole thing together, so he's to be commended for that. But there's a few myths that live on because everybody saw/read them in Eight Men Out -- and they're not true.

 

I haven't read the book. I knew the payroll was high for those times. And that always made it easier to see Comiskey try to choke away the bonuses from his players at the end of the year -- just common sense: The more you spend, the more you want back.

And another item goes into the Amazon wish list. ...

 

Thing is ... he never promised those big bonuses. The reason the Cicotte bonus story is so debunked is because there IS evidence of other bonuses paid to other players -- Lefty Williams got an extra $375 because he won 15 games in 1919, and there is documentation of that.

So not only does it not make sense that Comiskey would promise a $10K bonus to Cicotte when he paid a $375 bonus to his other starter, but when you look at the box scores for both 1917 and 1919, it shows that Cicotte was never benched to "save him for the Series" -- in fact, he was used in relief between starts because the White Sox were still battling Boston for the pennant.

It's a major theme in "Eight Men Out," that Comiskey's refusal to pay him his bonus was the reason why Cicotte agreed to the fix. But it's totally inaccurate.

 

I was talking about the World Series money. Wasn't there word that Comiskey wasn't going to give out the promised amount?

 

No.

What happened was Comiskey withheld the Series checks of the seven players rumored to be involved -- plus Weaver's. Comiskey had been aware of the fix since Game 1. Because the players grumbled about it, and no one had yet come forth with any public information (Comiskey had very publicly and very loudly promised a $10,000 bonus to anyone who could provide "serious evidence" that the Series wasn't on the level), he sent the players their checks in November and then went to work hushing up the rumors.

 

I enjoyed "Rudy" for whatever it was, fact or fiction. One of the greatest things about that movie was the scene it inspired in The Simpsons:

<Rudy chasing after Super Bowl-bound bus>

Rudy: Can I come?
Homer: You're too small to go to the Super Bowl, Rudy.
Rudy: But what I lack in size, I make up for in obnoxiounesssssss!