Eight Men Out

The trailer to the movie above
More On Eliot Asinof from Swarthmore Magazine

Ninth Man Out
OUTSIDERS, OUTCASTS, AND ELIOT ASINOF '40
By Jeffrey Lott
Occasionally, you discover a new author, and you just can't get enough. You read everything you can get your hands on, putting down one book and immediately picking up the next. You start seeing into a writer's mind--apart from the subjects and characters in his books--and you want to know more.
I came across the books of Eliot Asinof about a year ago. A Florida newspaper ran a brief profile on the publication of his latest book, Off-Season, a novel about a major league baseball star who returns to his hometown to find--and fight--racism and corruption. As a baseball fan, I wanted to read the novel, especially when I learned that Asinof had previously written Eight Men Out, a baseball book I had read and admired some years ago.
According to Swarthmore's computerized library catalog, a dozen of Asinof's books were in McCabe Library. Who was this person with 6 novels and 8 nonfiction works to his credit? I started reading, and, before long, I knew I wanted to meet him.
We talked last summer in a dark Sixth Avenue bar in New York. Tucked under his arm, neatly boxed and tied, was the original manuscript of Eight Men Out, his best-known and most successful book. As he showed this treasure to me, Asinof said that his next appointment was with an auctioneer of sports memorabilia who might buy it. But now there was time for a brandy and soda and a couple hours of conversation about his life and work.
We swapped baseball stories. I knew he was a New York-born Yankee fan; although I'm a Yankee hater from way back, I ad-mired the current World Champs from the Bronx. Only three of Asinof's books are about baseball, but I knew that playing the sport was how he defined himself as a youth.
"When I grew up, it was the game," he said. "Every kid had a glove." He spent his early years playing pickup games in New York's Central Park and later captained both his high school team on Long Island and the Swarthmore squad. At Swarthmore (where he transferred after a year at Williams), he encountered George Earnshaw, former Philadelphia Athletics star pitcher, then fire chief in the Ville.
"In his fading years as a ballplayer," said Asinof, "George threw half-speed batting practice for the College team to keep his arm in shape, and on Sundays he went up to New York to pitch for the Brooklyn Bushwicks for $200 a week. This is a guy who had pitched to Ruth and Gehrig, and I used to challenge him to throw me his best stuff. I could hit it all right--until he'd smile and fool me with an off-speed breaking pitch."
Asinof couldn't get enough baseball and soon found himself playing twilight ball for a semipro team in Chester, Pa., assuming the name Johnny Elliott to protect his college eligibility. Earnshaw thought the young first baseman might have the talent to play professionally after college and arranged for him to play summer ball in a New York-New England college league sponsored by the Big Leagues. There he became friends with Mickey Rutner, a solid player who would later get a shot at the majors--and who became the main character in Man on Spikes, Asinof's first book (1955).
The day he graduated from Swarthmore with Honors in history, Asinof signed a contract with the Philadelphia Phillies. He played two seasons in the minor leagues before joining the Army after the start of World War II.
"I played for joy, not for ambition," he later wrote. "The long, battering bus rides after night games, the inadequate lights, grubby locker rooms, sleazy hotel rooms, terrible food, low pay ... nothing bothered us, for we were playing ball."
Along the way, there were cruel, despotic managers and anti-Semitic obscenities from opposing players and fans. "It was, in many ways, a hate-ridden, competitive world, but in the end, the game was the thing, the only thing.... Baseball was played with a bat and a glove, not with a mouth."
His former teammate Mickey Rutner had taught him how to cope:
"'F-- 'em all, big and small,' Mickey used to say. This became the philosophical premise of my existence. Sometimes, you face situations where you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control, and if you try to reach a logical solution, you're gonna go crazy. So how do you save your ass? Say, 'F-- 'em all, big and small.' It gives you a sense of liberation."
Much of Asinof's work is about people who find themselves in situations like this, who struggle to hold on to their dignity and power.
There's Laurence Blutcher (People vs. Blutcher, 1970), a young black man whose entanglements with a brutal and corrupt criminal justice system become a poignant indictment of racism in America. There are Craig Badiali and Joan Fox (Craig and Joan, 1971), two New Jersey teens who commit suicide in 1969 as a protest against the Vietnam War--kids whose lives in an uptight suburb seem hopeless and beyond their control. The Fox Is Crazy Too (1976) is a portrait of Garrett Trapnell, a bank robber and con man who manipulates the insanity defense--which Asinof abhors--to evade prison.
It's the same in Asinof's fiction. Say It Ain't So, Gordon Littlefield (1977) recasts the Black Sox story as a dark but zany plot to throw the Super Bowl. The hero of his latest novel, Off Season, is a major-league ballplayer named John Cagle who confronts some demons from his past and recognizes that certain responsibilities go with his fame and fortune.
And then there's "Shoeless" Joe Jackson. Some say that Eight Men Out is the best baseball book ever written. As every fan knows, eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox took small-time money from big-time gamblers to throw that fall's World Series. When widespread rumors of a fix led to an investigation, the suspected players were hauled before a grand jury, where they confessed. All were banned from baseball by the team owners and their newly appointed enforcer, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Neither the gamblers who ruined the players' careers nor the owners who manipulated the scandal to further enslave their chattels were ever made to account for their actions.
Eight Men Out is the definitive book on the scandal. Asinof's sympathy lies with the players--men whose livelihood was controlled lock, stock, and jockstrap by the team owners and who became pawns in a big-money game. Joe Jackson is a particular hero, whereas the venal owners and their racetrack friends get rough treatment. An uneducated millhand--and prodigious slugger--from South Carolina, the vulnerable Jackson was first seduced by the conspirators and later forced to sign a confession that he couldn't even read. Jackson tried for years to return to baseball, playing at times under assumed names. But the ban held, and a promising career was lost.
For an author, such a book should be something to celebrate, but ultimately it taught Asinof some tough lessons about being a pawn himself. From the time he first became interested in the story, it seemed like the fix was in.
The Black Sox story was almost untouchable even before he tackled it. Asinof's first attempt came in a play he was commissioned to write for live television in 1960, but the production was killed before airtime by its sponsor, the DuPont Company. Apparently, then-Commissioner of Baseball Ford Frick told company and network executives that airing the Black Sox story would be "bad for baseball."
A New York Times report about Frick's censorship led to a call from an editor at Putnam's--and a book contract for Asinof. He set about reading everything that had been written about the scandal and covered thousands of miles tracking down surviving members of the team, many of whom would not talk about the 1919 World Series. When it was published in 1963, baseball fans embraced Eight Men Out, and it sold steadily--though not spectacularly--in the years that followed. Asinof optioned the movie rights several times. But surprisingly for such a dramatic story, no film was made for 25 years.
By the mid-1970s, after Asinof had written a half-dozen other books, he learned that David Susskind's Talent Associates was readying a show about the Black Sox for NBC-TV. Because he could not claim a copyright on history--historical events are considered to be in the public domain--Asinof says he thought little of the Susskind project until he also learned that Susskind had told the program's sponsor, IBM, that Talent Associates owned the rights to Eight Men Out.
Asinof strenuously objected. He didn't even own the rights himself, he told IBM; they were then held by a California producer--and certainly not by David Susskind. To its credit, IBM ordered NBC to stop the project, whereupon Susskind slapped Asinof with a $1.75 million lawsuit. It took many months--and many thousands of dollars--to defend himself, but Asinof finally prevailed. Later, he wrote an angry book about the Susskind affair, Bleeding Between the Lines (1979).
Eight Men Out languished after that, a tainted property. The rights returned to Asinof, and he managed to option them again in the early 1980s for $30,000.
"Not only had I not made any money on the book," he says, "but defending myself had cost me money and sapped my energies as a writer. At the time, [the $30,000] was a lot of money--a year's income--and it got me out of hock."
But, as Asinof points out, a piece of writing is "just like a painting. A painter sells his work for $100, and every guy who owns it after that sells it for more. The rights I sold for $30,000 ended up being bought by Orion Pictures for $125,000."
So it's no surprise that, according to Asinof, his first encounter on the set with independent filmmaker John Sayles went like this:
"You're on the rumor mill, El," said Sayles. "Everybody in the movie business thinks you're a troublemaker."
"Why did you hire me, then?" shot back Asinof.
"I hired you because of it."
Sayles and Asinof became close friends. Asinof calls Sayles' film "a reaffirmation. Suddenly, here comes a first-class guy who surrounds himself with first-class people. He knew what the movie business is like. Making that picture was a lot of fun at a time when I had a tendency to become cynical."
But Asinof's problems weren't over. The movie should have provided a golden opportunity for the first best-seller of Asinof's 40-year writing career. "But on the day the film opened," he says, "there was not one copy of my book in the City of New York," nor anywhere else in the country. Despite months of advance notice from Asinof about the movie, his publisher neglected to bring out a new printing to coincide with the release of the film.
In many of Asinof's books, you find a speech or passage that is clearly in the author's voice--usually a cry against hypocrisy or injustice. In Off-Season, protagonist Cagle's black roommate, Corky, makes an angry "I Have a Dream" speech about the future of race in America. In this ballplayer's dream--a nightmare really--baseball becomes the apotheosis of segregation and race war, with one all-white league and one all-black:
All games, then, will be a racial clash. I have a dream, Roomie, of high-flying spikes, of pitchers decking hitters, of body-crashing drama at home plate, of violence and rumors of violence.... Baseball will become the heart and soul of racist America, bringing in crowds beyond the greediest club owner's dream. The World Series, then, would be a modern reprise of the Civil War itself. I have a dream, Roomie, where the bullshit hypocrisy of America's quest for racial amity will once and for all be abandoned.
"Is this you? Your voice in Corky's speech?" I asked Asinof. "Do you think that the quest for racial amity is false?"
"Yes," he said quietly. "That's me. That's absolutely me.... Any black will tell you that--except those who buy in to the white world. The big leaguers now, they're all buying in."
"But you have to understand," he says. "Part of my education as a writer was the impact of all my lefty friends. In [the 1930s], that was respectable, at least until the McCarthy period, when they all went to jail or got blacklisted. You identified with the outsider because that's what you are--an alienated character in American society. It still exists in my work. In a world of people who buy in, I'm always trying to resist."
Asinof spent the late 1950s in Hollywood, married for a time to Marlon Brando's sister, but returned to New York in 1959. "I got out of LA by luck," he says. It reminded me of a passage about the film industry from his book Bleeding Between the Lines.
"Take the money. Take the money. Unquestionably, it was the sine qua non of survival in the entertainment business," he wrote. "No one ever blamed anyone for taking the money…. It was a phrase that could wear a man down, whittling away at his resistance until the wound was raw, the spirit infected.... It might take a man half a lifetime to develop his powers to resist--and less than an hour to sell them out."
Only three of Eliot Asinof''s (left) 14 books are about baseball, but the sport played a central role in his youth. After Swarthmore, he played in the minor leagues for two years with the 1940 St. Alban's [Vt.] Giants. Asinof's best-known book is Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal, later the subject of a film.
Eliot Asinof hasn't bought in, and he hasn't sold out. An upper-middle class kid, a top student, a star athlete, he was by his own admission a "straight arrow." When he and some friends got caught painting a red "S" on a Haverford College building on the eve of a football game, he says Dean Everett Hunt was almost in shock to find him among the miscreants.
But Swarthmore changed him. His books are peopled with outsiders, outlaws, and outcasts--and he doesn't mind if you think of him that way too. He's the self-styled ninth man out, the uncompromising tough guy of a professional ballplayer, complete with the "F-- 'em all" attitude. Yet in his work, there's intelligence and compassion; he celebrates the individual's ability to fight life's battles, to stand in against the high, tight fastball.
He remembers exactly when the light went on in his head--the crucial moment in his education--in a seminar with legendary Professor of Economics Clare Wilcox.
"One night we went to his home for the seminar, and he said, 'Leave all your stuff here--we're going into Philadelphia.' Seven or eight of us drove into Philadelphia to see John Steinbeck's movie Grapes of Wrath.
"Then we came back to his house--it was close to midnight, but his wife made tea and served cookies--and he spent the next hour talking about the economics of Grapes of Wrath. I learned a lot about what America was like that night.
"I've never forgotten that," he said quietly.