Integral, though, is the cooperation of the pitching staff's ace, the aging veteran Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn). Gandil now has to recruit enough teammates for the fix to work, and he finds relatively easy sells in shortstop Swede Risberg (Don Harvey), outfielder Hap Felsch (Charlie Sheen) and utilityman Fred McMullin (Perry Lang). Gandil's willing to play ball in his greed, though, he goes behind Sullivan's back and jumps in the pocket of two other sleazy small-timers, Bill Burns (Christopher Lloyd) and Billy Maharg (Richard Edson).
With that mindset, the Boston fixer Sport Sullivan (Kevin Tighe) sets his sights on the Sox's most readily corruptible mark, first baseman Chick Gandil (Michael Rooker). Comiskey's maltreatment of the team is so notorious, in fact, that professional gamblers-who, in the day, had easy access to professional ballplayers-found it probable that enough of the players could be successfully bribed to throw the upcoming Series against the odds-against Cincinnati Reds. After finishing the season with the majors' best record, the team gets informed by a flunky that their promised bonus for winning the pennant consists of the clubhouse champagne-which, of course, is flat. In 1919, free agency was generations away in the offing, and major league baseball players were more or less the indentured help of the team owners in Sayles' scenario, few ran their plantations as shabbily as Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey (Clifton James). Independent writer-director John Sayles turned in a meticulous and engrossing dramatization of baseball's most notorious incident when he crafted Eight Men Out (1988).
Time once was, though, that the sport's status wasn't quite so sacrosanct, and a seismic shake in public confidence could have resulted in its toppling. The strike-induced cancellation of the 1994 World Series the gambling-fueled fall from grace of icon Pete Rose the public light shined on a private players' culture that embraced performance-enhancing drug use. In the last generation, the game of baseball has gotten the opportunity to prove its immutable place in the fabric of American culture, considering how it's weathered some of the most palpable hits ever to its standing.
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