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Eight Men Out

1988 film directed by John Sayles

Eight Men Out is a 1988 film about the Black Sox scandal when the underpaid Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series.

Directed and written by John Sayles, based on Eliot Asinof's 1963 book Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series.
When the cheering stopped, there were... Eight Men Out. (taglines)

Buck Weaver

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  • You get out there, and the stands are full and everybody's cheerin'. It's like everybody in the world come to see you. And inside of that there's the players, they're yakkin' it up. The pitcher throws and you look for that pill... suddenly there's nothing else in the ballpark but you and it. Sometimes, when you feel right, there's a groove there, and the bat just eases into it and meets that ball. When the bat meets that ball and you feel that ball just give, you know it's going to go a long way. Damn, if you don't feel like you're going to live forever.

Eddie Cicotte

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  • I always figured it was talent made a man big, you know, if I was the best at something. I mean, we're the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain't a ballgame. Yeah, but look at who's holding the money and look at who's facing a jail cell. Talent don't mean nothing. And where's Comiskey and Sullivan, Attell, Rothstein? Out in the back room cutting up profits, that's where. That's the damn conspiracy.

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis

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  • Regardless of the verdict of juries... no player who throws a ball game... no player who undertakes, or promises to throw a game... no player who sits in conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing a ball game are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it... will ever play professional baseball again.

Dialogue

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[the Sox have just won the AL penant and are in the clubhouse. Some champagne bottles are sitting on a table]
Eddie Cicotte: What's this, Harry?
Harry: Mr. Comiskey sent these down for you. A congratulations for a successful pennant race.
Eddie Cicotte: That's awfully white of him. He didn't happen to mention when we can expect that bonus he promised us in return for taking the flag, did he?
Harry: This is your bonus.
Swede Risberg: Cheap bastard.
Kid Gleason: Look, fellas, if it was up to me...
Eddie Cicotte: Kid, we got no beef with you. [opens one of the champagne bottles - nothing happens] It's flat.
Eddie Cicotte: It's about my bonus, Mr. Comiskey. You promised me a $10,000 bonus if I won 30 games this year and I think I deserve it.
Charles Comiskey: Harry, how many games did Mr. Cicotte win for us this year?
Harry: 29, Mr. Comiskey.
Eddie Cicotte: You told Kid to sit me down the last two weeks of the season to get ready for the series. That cost me five more starts; I know I would have won at least two more games.
Charles Comiskey: We had to get your arm ready for the series.
Eddie Cicotte: I deserve that bonus.
Charles Comiskey: 29 is not 30, Eddie. You will get only the money you deserve.
Eddie Cicotte: It's your ball club Mr. Comiskey.
Sport Sullivan: You know what you feed a dray horse in the morning if you want a day's work out of him?
Jimmy: What?
Sport Sullivan: Just enough so he knows he's hungry.
Chick Gandil: You go back to Boston and turn seventy grand at the drop of a hat? I find that hard to believe.
Sport Sullivan: You say you can find seven men on the best club that ever took the field willin' to throw the World Series? I find that hard to believe.
Chick Gandil: You never played for Charlie Comiskey.
Abe Atell: They say that six or seven guys. I find that hard to believe.
Arnold Rothstein: Doesn't surprise me.
Abe Atell: Yeah, but they're the champs.
Arnold Rothstein: You were champ, Abe, you went down for the bucks.
Abe Atell: This is different.
Arnold Rothstein: Look, champ. I know guys like that. I grew up with them. I was the fat kid they wouldn't let play. "Sit down, fat boy'. That's what they'd say "Sit down, maybe you'll learn something." Well, I learned something alright. Pretty soon, I owned the game, and those guys I grew up with come to me with their hats in their hands. Tell me, champ, all those years of puggin', how much money did you make?
Abe Atell: The honest fights or the ones I tanked?
Arnold Rothstein: Altogether, I must've made ten times that amount betting on you and I never took a punch.
Abe Atell: Yeah, but I was champ. Featherweight champeen of the world!
Arnold Rothstein: Yesterday. That was yesterday.
Abe Atell: No A.R. you're wrong. I was champ, and can't nothin take that away.
Sport Sullivan: Look at those hands, ladies. You should have been a pug, Chickie.
Chick Gandil: I did some fighting in my time. Once I was fighting a guy, my eyes were all bloody but I landed a lucky punch. The next thing I know I'm steppin' on something and it's the other guy's teeth. The referee raised my hand and someone shoved fifty bucks in my shorts. "What does he get?" I asked. The referee says, "From the looks of this jaw, a liquid diet for six weeks." Now what we should have done is held each other up for thirteen rounds and split the fifty.
Hired Killer: You're gonna lose tomorrow.
Lefty Williams: Oh, is that so?
Hired Killer: I know it for a fact. That your wife?
Lefty Williams: Yeah, what's it to you?
Hired Killer: You don't lose tomorrow, she dies.
Lefty Williams: Who sent you?
Hired Killer: You made a promise to certain people.
Lefty Williams: You son of a bitch!
Hired Killer: You can't protect her. If I don't do it, somebody else will. First inning, Mister Williams.

Taglines

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  • The inside story of how one team, for a price, broke all the rules...along with the heart of every kid in the USA.
  • When the cheering stopped, there were...Eight Men Out.
  • 1919. The year America saw major league baseball played a whole new way...underhanded.
  • The Scandal That Rocked A Nation
  • The inside story of how the national pastime became a national scandal.

Cast

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