THE BLACK SOX SCANDAL was the sports crime of the 20th century. In a complicated and poorly conceived and executed conspiracy, several prominent Chicago White Sox ballplayers teamed up with gamblers to lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. No sports scandal has similarly shocked America or had such a lasting impact on its culture. Journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights, historians, and filmmakers have all reconstructed the affair and put it to various uses. You can hear echoes of it in Bernard Malamud's The Natural; witness Joe Jackson's resurrection in W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, the novel on which Phil Alden Robinson's film Field of Dreams is based; and contemplate the scandal's complex morality in John Sayles's Eight Men Out, the movie adaptation of Eliot Asinof's popular history. Douglass Wallop, best known for his novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, described the scandal as "a labyrinth, an incredible maze of doublecrosses upon doublecrosses, of broken promises, of guileless stupidity among the players, of artful, cruel deceit among those who manipulated them—gamblers, baseball executives, and public officials alike."
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