This is one of the greatest sports stories ever told, the real story about how and WHY they fixed the World Series. Eliot Asinof's book should be read by anyone interested in history, and Sayles does an admirable job of tying it all together into a script (Sayles even cast Asinof in the movie, and then cast him again in Sunshine State.) It's a story that anyone interested in a history of America, a history of labor and management, a history of the greatest game will definitely enjoy. After reading it, the Shoeless Joe character from "Field of Dreams" suddenly has a resonance which that particular film could never explain (though it is nicely explained in the source for that film "Shoeless Joe") Also worth reading is "The Glory of Their Times" an oral history of early baseball.

When the team that couldn't be beat threw the World Series in 1919 they did more than deliberately lose a few baseball games; they corrupted the National Pastime and ushered the sport out of its age of innocence. Writer director John Sayles succeeds in showing exactly how and why eight players on the best team in baseball set in motion what had to be one of the most poorly conceived, organized and executed conspiracies in the whole history of graft, and in his usual role as a champion of the working class portrays the guilty players as victims of money-grubbing corporate exploitation (represented both by team management and organized crime).

But it's all the cynical wheeling and dealing behind the Black Sox scandal which make the film so fascinating. The story might have been unbelievable if it wasn't entirely true, but like any aspect of real life the details are messy and inconclusive. Most of the film recounts the mechanics of the fix; events during the subsequent exposure and trial are telescoped too quickly into the final forty minutes or so, which makes sense: in any conspiracy the crime is always more interesting than the punishment.

It helps to be at least slightly familiar with the huge cast of characters involved: players, gamblers, reporters and so forth. A few scenes have been added for dramatic unity, and others were abbreviated to maintain a consistent pace, but all the facts are there, and Sayles manages to pull them all together in an entertaining history lesson from our collective adolescence, re-creating that fateful moment when the boys of summer grew up for good.

It has been just over 100 years since this real life scandal took place in professional baseball, and while it has been pretty much forgotten, there was definitely an impact made because of what occurred. There had been movies made about Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, and their lives are well remembered as well as their accomplishments. But this doesn't just deal with one player. It deals with an entire team, the 1919 Chicago White Sox.

The scandal mixes organized crime in with the financial mistreatment of the team which leads them to make a deal with the devil, Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner in a great part), fraud involving the World Series. Owner Clifton James may be unaware of the fraud, but he's equally as responsible because his greediness prompted teammates to purposely throw the series against the Cincinnati Reds. One of the teammates, John Cusack, is uninvolved in the fraud, but is made guilty simply because he's a teammate and evidence points at him that he is guilty.

A good featured cast includes such familiar actors as Charlie Sheen, Christopher Lloyd, Barbara Garrick, D. B. Sweeney and John Mahoney. The film gets more interesting as it really gets into the major plot, but there's a lot of seller. The impact what happens is shown as to how it affects each of the players, particularly Cusack. Of course baseball historians are going to be the most interested in this, but it's also good from a historical standpoint as well. Just a little too long for my taste. A good 20 minutes could have been cut out.