Eight Men Out - John Sayles (1988)

"Eight Men Out is a 1988 American dramatic sports film, and based on Eliot Asinof's 1963 book 8 Men Out. It was written and directed by John Sayles. The film is a dramatization of Major League Baseball's Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose the 1919 World Series. ... The 1919 Chicago White Sox are considered the greatest team in baseball and, in fact, one of the greatest ever assembled to that point. However, the team's owner, Charles Comiskey, is a skinflint with little inclination to reward his players for a spectacular season. When gamblers gets wind of the players' discontent, they offer a select group of Sox — including star pitcher Eddie Cicotte — more money to play badly than they would have earned by winning the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. A number of players, including Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, and Lefty Williams, go along with the scheme. The team's greatest star, Shoeless Joe Jackson, is depicted as being not very bright and not entirely sure what is going on. Buck Weaver, meanwhile, is included with the seven others but insists that he wants nothing to do with the fix."
Wikipedia

"... Eight Men Out is the story of the 1919 World Series-fixing scheme that shattered the faith of this boy and so many others. As such, it's much more than a film about baseball. It's an amazingly full and heartbreaking vision of the dreams, aspirations and disillusionments of a nation, as filtered through its national pastime. Eight Men Out, which opens today at Loews Tower East and other theaters, establishes its scope in a wonderfully edited (by John Tintori) opening ballpark scene that shows how many disparate elements Mr. Sayles will bring into play. There are the Chicago White Sox themselves, just on the verge of winning the pennant and in their full bloom of talent and optimism. There are the White Sox wives and children, bursting with pride, and the fans, whose excitement fills the air. There is also the team's owner, Charles Comiskey (Clifton James), whose stinginess is so extraordinary that he rewards his players for winning the pennant with bottles of flat Champagne."
NY Times

Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series
"The headlines proclaimed the 1919 fix of the World Series and attempted cover-up as 'the most gigantic sporting swindle in the history of America!' First published in 1963, Eight Men Out has become a timeless classic. Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation's leading gamblers to throw the Series in Cincinnati. Mr. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. Moving behind the scenes, he perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible. Here, too, is a graphic picture of the American underworld that managed the fix, the deeply shocked newspapermen who uncovered the story, and the war-exhausted nation that turned with relief and pride to the Series, only to be rocked by the scandal. Far more than a superbly told baseball story, this is a compelling slice of American history in the aftermath of World War I and at the cusp of the Roaring Twenties."
amazon

"... That’s not a criticism of their performances - it was great to see Terkel chewing his cigar and looking as if he’d seen it all - but of the screenplay. If you’re going to make a movie about a baseball scandal that happened before most of the audience was born, you’d better start by making it understandable and then move on to considerations of art and drama. Perhaps the problem is that Sayles, who wrote as well as directed the film, was so close to the material that he never decided what the focus of his story really was. Early in the film, we get a lot of vignettes designed to give us a flavor for professional baseball at the time, and they’re intercut with short personal or domestic scenes in which the characters are established, but not very clearly. ..."
Roger Ebert

Eight Men Out: 25 Things You Didn't Know About the Classic Baseball Drama
"... Public sympathy for 'Shoeless Joe' Jackson and his teammates has built ever since the release of this movie, generally regarded as one of the finest baseball films ever made. Still, there's a lot you probably don't know about Eight Men Out, including which of its stars had real potential as ballplayers, the tricks Sayles used to recreate the 1919 World Series on a budget, the truth about the 'Say it ain't so, Joe' incident, and the inspirational story of Black Betsy. Read on for the behind-the-scenes story of Sayles' pitch. ..."
moviefone

YouTube: Eight Men Out 1988 trailer