Top-level gamblers who controlled the action remained hidden from the small-time gamblers who operated on their own. Many of the participants never met each other nor even knew of each other’s existence. No one person could possibly know all the factors.
Obviously, there were too many diverse ingredients to be uncovered from any one source. Apparently, the real truth was lying hidden beneath the weight of all the reports and speculations. The complete story, shrouded in complexity and silence, remained untold. No one delved into the scandal’s causes and morality, exploded its myths and distortions.
But the accounts, at the time and since, have inevitably been fragmentary. The Black Sox Scandal, as it came to be called, was reported in its day on the front pages of every major newspaper in the country, then revived in a score of magazine articles and described in histories of modern baseball. The 1919 World Series sellout and its dramatic aftermath has long remained in the public eye. 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.įar 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. 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. 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. 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!" 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. First published in 1963, Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out has become a timeless classic of a scandalous world series.
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