Everyone seems to think the owners got the better deal. Ain't that how it always is.
So it feels particularly appropriate that on the eve before this year's opening day, as per my tradition, I watched an old favorite about ballplayers and their owner fighting with each other, and the owner winning.
The ballplayers were the 1919 Chicago White Sox, the owner was Charles Comiskey, and the movie is, of course, John Sayles' Eight Men Out, which I've seen about three times, but not since the early 1990s.
The reason eight players on the White Sox famously agreed to throw the World Series for $10,000 apiece, which would make untold amounts more for the crooked gamblers who put them up to it, was that they felt used and abused by Comiskey, who gave them flat champagne as a "bonus" for winning their division, and refused to pay them contractually obligated bonuses, adjusting their playing time downward to make it impossible to reach the statistical milestones those bonuses depended on. (I always think of how starting pitcher Eddie Cicotte, played by David Straitharn, was denied a $10,000 bonus that he would have received if he'd reached 30 wins. He was stopped at 29, largely because the manager didn't play him for a two-week stretch, on orders from the owner.)
As evidence of how history always remembers the winners and not the losers, only one name from that group of players (Shoeless Joe Jackson, who also appears in Field of Dreams) ever made it to household name status when the players were banned for life by new commissioner Kenesaw "Mountain" Landis. Comiskey? That baseball park bore his name for 80 years until it was demolished in 1991, and I'm sure the casual fan thinks he was just swell.
I can't say the movie left me "pumped" for opening day like these movies are designed to do, as it's a pretty solemn and somber affair. However, to be honest, I did not require much pumping. I was already as pumped as I needed to be.
The movie itself probably didn't hold up quite as well for me as I was hoping, though much better than my disastrous revisit of the aforementioned Field of Dreams a few years ago. Over the years I'd built it up as this stately example of prestige filmmaking, but I found parts of it hokey and obvious and dependent on unsubtle exposition. Fortunately, by the end it did land in that same profound space of feeling sorrow and confusion for everyone involved, as no one really got out of that unscathed. Even as an apparent "winner," Comiskey looks at the end like it took years off his life.
Two takeaways:
1) I had forgotten Charlie Sheen was in this. He's of course one of the stars of my favorite baseball movie, Major League, and him appearing in this and two Major League movies made me wonder if we should think of him a bit like we think of Kevin Costner in terms of being typecast as a baseball player. I even thought of a blog post comparing Sheen's and Costner's baseball outputs, but a) you don't need a third straight baseball-related movie post on this blog, and b) Costner probably has him beat just for sheer quantity of baseball movies -- I count four for Costner, and none is a sequel.
2) I had also forgotten the director was in it, and in fact, I didn't actually know what he looked like so I had to look him up afterward. Strange that I wouldn't know how John Sayles looked considering how long he's been making movies. His role as one of the guys investigating the possible fix is an all-business turn that convinced me he's pretty good at this here acting thing.
In the past, my movie watching would suffer a bit once the baseball season started. But one benefit of moving to Australia is that the games play in the morning/early afternoon, and most of my movie watching is at night. So, expect my usual stream of new viewings, and regular posts whenever I think of something actually worth saying.
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