How Field Of Dreams Whitewashes Baseball History and The Black Sox

 

 

In August of 2021, Major League Baseball staged what they called ‘The Field Of Dreams’ game. They constructed an old time baseball-field in an actual field in Iowa. They got the Yankees and the White Sox to wear uniforms circa 1920. They got Kevin Costner to do a play by play with the traditional Fox Sportscasting team.

From a strictly commercial standpoint, this game was a huge success. Nearly nine million viewers tuned in, the highest rating for a nationally broadcasted game in years. It seemed to be the kind of boost the game needed after years of stagnating in the national imagination.

In retrospect, however, I really question why baseball decided to make it a signature game. I get the logic in theory: Field of Dreams is a film that has entered the national consciousness in a way most baseball movies – and indeed few sports movies – rarely do. And I need to be clear: I believe that the film is a masterpiece. It is superbly acted from Costner all the way down to Burt Lancaster, it’s superb on every technical level, especially the music but the editing to and it has the ability to move me to tears even after more than thirty years after my first viewing of it.

The problem is, however, in those intervening years I’ve become an expert in baseball history. And I really think the only reason this was greenlit as an idea had to do with an entire generation of executives who only knew about the movie and nothing about the story behind it.

To be clear, I agree completely that one of the most badly aged portions of the film now involves James Earl Jones delivering a monologue in which he stands and argues about the basic goodness of baseball – when he is speaking of an era well before integration. That this never occurred to anyone in the Commissioner’s Office – particularly considering the big problems that the sport is having with African-Americans at every level, whether it be playing or even watching the sport  - would be shocking, if I didn’t know far too well just how tone-deaf the executives in the sport have always been.

But believe it or now the monologue that Jones delivers at the climax of the film is far worse when you consider the context of the entire raison deter for the film’s existence. I’m guessing that when Phil Alden Robinson finally managed to get Field of Dreams released in 1989, he was really hoping that critics and audiences either hadn’t seen or had forgotten a film that had been released the previous year that laid very clear the truth about the Black Sox scandal.

John Sayles’ Eight Men Out is not quite the masterpiece that Field of Dreams is. While Sayles is one of the best filmmakers of our era and is also a devoted baseball fan he tries to be too faithful to the source material, Eliot Asinof’s history of the same name. To be clear, his story is not only more accurate but makes it very clear on what was going on in baseball before, during and in the aftermath of the Black Sox throwing the 1919 World Series. He is sympathetic to the eight players who chose to throw the series to the point that he puts too much emphasis on them being misled by the gamblers and the money, which is giving them too much credit. But he makes it clear that there is nothing majestic or good about the game back in 1919 and he doesn’t see the Black Sox, even Shoeless Joe Jackson, as some kind of saint. A martyr, perhaps, but not a saint.

Now I have to give credit to Robinson where its due. I have read the book that Field of Dreams is based on: W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. And no matter what opinion you have about the film, I have to say he managed to make great movie out of what is horrible material. Because Kinsella’s book, charitably speaking, doesn’t seem to be the thing that could be adapted easily (I’m told it took six years for Robinson to get it to the theaters from the moment he began the project).

For those of you who wonder about James Earl Jones’ role as 1960s writer Terence Mann, this is a complete invention. In the novel Ray Kinsella is told by ‘the voice’ that he must seek out J.D. Salinger and bring him to Iowa. That was never going to be viable and it must have taken years for Robinson to thread that needle. I think that Mann is supposed to be some combination of Salinger and James Baldwin and I honestly think that change is one of the better things the film does. One of my favorite segments in the film is when Annie (Amy Madigan) is in a school board meeting that has to do with censorship and Mann’s books are among the ones under consideration.

This scene stands out better, frankly, then many of the stories on baseball. Perhaps Robinso is trying to equate baseball as much an American institution as the Bill of Rights but he’s subtle enough never to have them come as part of the equation. And the scene where Annie confronts this woman boldly in front of an audience: “Who’s for the Bill of Rights? Who thinks freedom is a pretty darn good thing?” is frankly the kind of thing that more people should see even if they don’t like baseball.

That scene, for the record, is a complete invention of Robinson’s: there’s nothing close to it to the book. Indeed, the final revelation of who Ray has built the field for comes to the forefront early as is the fact that Ray actually has an identical twin brother who shows up unexpectedly. I have to tell you part of me does think that Shoeless Joe is metafiction more than an actual novel (the lead is Ray Kinsella in the book too) which makes it all the more remarkable that Robinson created a coherent and intelligent story. The problem comes, however, with the fact that he still decided to make Ray build a field and have Shoeless Joe Jackson show up.

I’ll be honest. If I had been in Ray’s situation in 1989, there are many other players of that era I would prefer to see come out of the corn. Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander to be sure; Christy Mathewson for many reasons (not the least of which is irony.) I’d have loved to see Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s of either of his dynasties or John McGraw’s Giants. I would have wanted to see Babe Ruth and yes even Ty Cobb. But Shoeless Joe Jackson would have been at the rock bottom of my list, along with every one who was banned from baseball.

Because the real heresy of Field Of Dreams is that it made a hero out of not only Joe Jackson but the entire Black Sox team. For a movie that is supposedly centered on Jackson showing up, Robinson does everything in his power to focus on Jackson the legend and not Jackson the man. The metaphor is about how the Black Sox’s betrayal crippled Ray’s father and that’s understandable: the scandal did do immense damage to the sport. But the entire film either argues that Jackson was an innocent bystander or someone who was a patsy. This barely holds scrutiny based on the public record, and even if you accept it  by that logic: the last people Jackson would ever invite to this field were his teammates who just being around led to him to losing his livelihood.

I realize that Field of Dreams is a fantasy and not a docudrama the same way Eight Men Out is, but that only goes so far. That’s actually the biggest problem I have with Jones speech in hindsight: it’s not that he’s arguing that baseball was good in a time when it was segregated; it’s that he’s doing so in the name of a team that was corrupt and did everything it could to destroy the game they played.

And if anything Sayles’ film doesn’t go nearly far enough when it comes to describing just how broken the Black Sox were. Donald Honig, who I have quoted about baseball on numerous occasion is, if anything more reliable a historian than Asinof’s was. In Baseball America where he speaks in reverential tones about so much of baseball, he regards the Black Sox with contempt – and he shows the receipts.

“They were a hell of a team,” a contemporary tells him. “They could go out there and beat you just about any time they felt like it.” Honig then adds: “Didn’t they always feel like it? Frankly no.”

He then quotes Roger Peckinpaugh, a shortstop of the era who was playing with the Yankees.

“I remember one time we went to Chicago and Nemo Leibold (a White Sox who was basically ‘clean)…said “he smelled a mouse. ‘Listen,” (Leibold said something screwy is going on here…You guys just bear down and you should be able to take all four games.’” You never knew when they were going to go out there and beat your brains out or roll over and play dead.”

The idea that Jackson would ‘play for nothing’ as Ray Liotta has him say in the film, is pure myth. The White Sox were among the poorest paid teams in the majors: Jackson, who was one of the greatest hitters in baseball was only making $6000 a year. Men like Cobb and Walter Johnson were making more than twice that.

Furthermore there was no harmony on the Black Sox. There were factions of the level of some of the greatest divisions of all time. Five of the players who ended up throwing the series – Jackson, Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch and Lefty Williams were on one side. On the other was Eddie Collins, Ray Schalk and two of the pitchers Red Faber and Dickie Kerr. During infield practice, no one threw the ball to Collins, who was getting the highest salary by far. Before the 1919 World Series, Gandil hadn’t so much as talked to him in two years. Collins said: “I used to think you couldn’t win without teamwork – until I joined the White Sox.”

And united the bad faction was their hatred of Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner and one of the most stingiest in baseball. Efforts have been made to clean up Comiskey’s reputation by saying he wasn’t as bad as any other owner, which is basically saying he didn’t abuse his slaves worse than any other slave-master. The team manage to win more out of their hatred for Comiskey and that barely overwhelmed their contempt for each other – which led them to throw the series.

And despite what Field of Dreams tells you, Jackson threw the series. Yes he may have hit .375 and was charged with no errors but the fact remains he took $5,000 from gamblers. He was promised $20,000. The one who has the clearest claim to innocence is third baseman Buck Weaver. He took no money and played the series honestly. His crime was that he knew about what was happening but didn’t rat his teammates out. He would have made a more sympathetic protagonist for Field Of Dreams then Jackson would (he certainly does in Eight Men Out) but Weaver was just a good player and Jackson was a great one, which makes for a better story.

I don’t deny Jackson was one of the greatest hitters whoever lived. He hit .408 his rookie year, batting .395 the next year, and hit .382 in 1920 before he was banned for life. His lifetime batting average of.356 is the third highest all time behind only Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby and Cobb himself called him the greatest natural hitter he ever saw. But as Eight Men Out takes clear, he still took the money with the intention of throwing the series. It doesn’t matter whether he followed through or not; he took the money. He also confessed to it before a Chicago Grand Jury in 1920 when the scandal came out.

That’s the other part that gets left out. The White Sox were in close contention for the 1920 American League Pennant when the scandal finally broke near the end of the season. It’s worth noting several of the other players suspecting they weren’t giving their all that year either. Who knows? Maybe they thought if they won the pennant that year they’d have ready made in with the mob. “We did it last year, remember?”

There was a trial but no one went to jail. For one thing, much of the key evidence – including Jackson’s confession – ‘mysteriously’ disappeared before the jury could see it. This was 1920s Chicago and cops were as buyable as baseball players back then. For the record I’m not sure it would have made much of a difference: for all the public dismay at what Jackson and his teammates were doing, they were celebrities and I can’t imagine 12 Chicago Men could have been impartial.

And that’s why I think Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was named Commissioner of baseball even before the scandal broke, acted correctly when he banned the White Sox for life. He had every intention of doing so before the verdict which is why his famous statement began: “Regardless of the verdict of juries…”

Landis is framed by men such Sayles as a showboat federal judge who was basically an autocrat. That’s a fair description and I don’t deny his behavior in later years would more than merit that attitude. But his decision to ban the Black Sox for life was absolutely the right call.

Imagine if they had been acquitted and allowed to return to play ball in the 1922 season. (The trial took place in the summer of 1921.) Imagine it, eight ballplayers known for being willing to sell out the national game just showing up to their old jobs as if nothing had happened. If you think I’m exaggerating this as a possibility, gamblers had already been bribing players to throw games for decades before the scandal and Major League Baseball had turned a blind eye, which is why the 1919 World Series ending up getting thrown in the first place. Hal Chase was listed as having thrown games for three different managers and each time, he was simply traded to a different team. (In one case they fired the manager and named Chase in his stead.) Chase was still around baseball in 1919 and may have served as a go-between for the mob leading up to the World Series that year. He got banned, along with more than a dozen other players, along with the White Sox for this activity.

So Landis really had no choice. These men had sold out the game. And we all know that just because you’re acquitted of a crime or scandal is no guarantee they won’t do it again. No matter how hard you try to polish it up Jackson was guilty of the crimes he was accused of. Because of his standing in the game he has defenders since his exile, and Field of Dreams was just the icing on the cake.

This makes me wonder when he wanders out of the cornfield and asks Ray: “Is this heaven?” where he’s been. Because he sure as hell doesn’t belong in the same baseball heaven that is devoted for Mathewsons and Wagner’s and the Walter Johnsons. Perhaps he and his White Sox have been in a kind of purgatory or limbo all this time, or the ban that has stopped them from playing baseball in life has followed them in death.

That still lends a turn that I’m not fond of because it means that there are no consequences for these men who have decided to betray the sport and leave a stain on it that lasted for decades. Now they get to play baseball in front of people who will only worship them as some shadows of a simpler time.

And it makes me wonder if at the end of the day, when all of these people mysteriously drive up to this field in Iowa whether Ray, desperate to get out of the financial straits his venture has brought him to, might convince these people who know no better to wager on the game they’re about to see. I mean, they’re going to pay $20 without even thinking about, why not go whole hog?

Get the Black Sox to play against any of the teams in this field. Offer long odds for betting on them. Then tell Joe and his friends that they don’t have to win every game. Hell, it’s not like they don’t have experience in this kind of thing already and they’re already dead! What difference does it make? Like Ray said, this isn’t heaven. It’s Iowa.

All right this last part may be a bit too dark and cynical. But the fact remains that Major League Baseball chose to market a game modeled on a team with this history as its signature event. After a century of arguing that Jackson’s legacy besmirched the game, they are willing to use a film that whitewashed it to make money of it. How can truly say they are celebrating baseball history with a straight face?

Baseball repeated the event the following year but has since let it go. Perhaps, given some of the changes that they have made in the past season, they have decided to concentrate more on baseball’s future rather than the past. That is the right idea as long as they remember to revere the figures who gave the game glory rather than to celebrate those who brought it shame. You can enjoy Field Of Dreams, but never mistake it for a true story.