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Jonathan Hafetz

Hi, I'm Jonathan Heifetz, and welcome to Law on Film, a podcast that explores the rich connections between law and film. Law is critical to many films. Film, in turn, tells us a lot about the law. In each episode, we'll examine a film that's noteworthy from a legal perspective. What legal issues does the film explore? What does it get right about the law and what does it get wrong?

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Jonathan Hafetz

How is law important to understanding the film, and what does the film teach us about the law and about the larger social and cultural context in which it operates? This episode, we'll look at Eight Men Out, a 1988 movie about Major League Baseball's infamous Black Sox scandal, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose a 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The film, which was directed by John Sayles, is based on Elliott, as in a 1963 book, Eight Men Out the Black Socks and the 1919 World Series. The film describes how a group of White Sox players conspired with an array of gamblers, including notorious underworld financier Arnold Rothstein, aka The Big Bankroll, to throw the series in return for cash.

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Jonathan Hafetz

After the Sox, who some consider one of the greatest baseball teams of all time, lost the series, suspicions grew that there had been a fix based on rumors and the nature of some players poor performances. Eight players were charged with conspiracy and tried in Chicago in 1921, although the players were all acquitted, baseball's new commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banished them all for life from baseball, a bold move that some believe saved the game of baseball, which was then still in its relative infancy and helped it become America's pastime.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Debates around the events nevertheless continue to this day, including over the level of involvement of some players and the draconian nature of the punishment. Joining me to discuss eight men out are Robert Boland and Brett Kaufman. Robert Boland or Bob as I call him, is a nationally known sports law professor and practitioner who joined the faculty at Seton Hall Law after serving five years in a first of its kind National role as athletics integrity officer at Penn State University.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The role, which was created by consent decree in the aftermath of the Sandusky crisis, helped ensure that Penn State's athletic department, which was $180 million annual revenue producer with more than 350 employees, was meeting all standards imposed by law and NCAA and Big Ten rules. Boland had reporting relationships with the president and board of trustees. He also held teaching appointments in Penn State's Law School and School of Labor and Employment Relations.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Before joining Penn State, Bob was a faculty member for 15 years, leading extreme sports management programs at New York University, where he was academic chair of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management and the founding professor of its Graduate Sports Management Program, and in Ohio University, where he served as the director of the top ranked MBA masters of Sports Administration program.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Bob is a widely sought after expert on sports, business and sports law subjects, with his comments appearing in national media outlets over the last two decades. Bob is also my colleague at Seton Hall, so it's great to have him on for that reason as well. Turning to another former colleague at the ACLU, Brett Kaufman is a senior attorney at the ACLU center for democracy, where he works on a variety of issues related to national security, technology, surveillance, privacy and First Amendment rights.

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Jonathan Hafetz

He's litigated landmark cases involving challenges to the government's mass surveillance program, to detention of U.S. citizens, enemy combatants, and to a mass aerial surveillance program in Baltimore. Brett has also taught at New York University School of Law and currently teaches at UCLA School of Law. Brett, formerly before his storied ACLU career as a prominent civil liberties litigator, was the baseball beat writer for the Stanford Daily in college and wrote features for Baseball America.

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Jonathan Hafetz

He also wrote for David Roth's long defunct The classical website Brett. Last but not least, is a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. Bob. Brett. Great to have you on the podcast to talk about baseball and eat man out.

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Brett Kaufman

Great to be here.

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Robert Boland

It's my pleasure.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So Chicago 1919. Can you give some background on baseball, where things were then and the Chicago White Sox at this point in time?

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Robert Boland

I'll go first, if that makes any sense, because it sort of fits my background as a labor guy and a labor historian. And the history of baseball is really a history of controlling players. By the early 1900s, the Central League led by band Johnson, to which the White Sox were a part of, had grown dramatically and was poaching players from the older, more established National League.

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Robert Boland

And to put an end to that, Major League Baseball or baseball. There wasn't a major League Baseball then recognize the Central League as the newly named American League, and created a World Series as a result to keep them from poaching players from the older, more established National League players salaries were really, really flat, around $4,000, and it really was only the competition of moving from league to league that allowed players to really create any, any monetary advantage for themselves.

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Robert Boland

We see a lot of case law out of the early days of this, but the apology week for an injunction was enforced and that it couldn't be enforced in another state. We have a lot of fun cases out of that, but the mid 19 teens, a group of owners and a group of players had come together to form the federal leagues.

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Robert Boland

The federal leagues didn't last long, but it was built on player empowerment and salaries suddenly went right up, including significant amounts of salary. So by 1916, the federal leagues had fallen. They were all out of business. The players were back down under the oppression of ownership with the inability to move, and basically the National and American leagues holding a block over that.

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Robert Boland

So if we're seeing this as an interesting moment, this is the moment that players on the eve of the Roaring 20s and the eve of sport being in its golden age, kind of stepped forward. And rather than getting more money, they seek other means to look for it here in consorting with gamblers and dealing with some of these issues.

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Robert Boland

And then what transpires out of that? Obviously a huge literary moment, but really almost all the structures we know in sports today, the creation of the office of the commissioner, the idea that the commissioner has a best interest clause to use what's referred to in the movie as all power. When you talked about my time as athletic integrity officer at Penn State, all I could think of is I wish I had a best interest clause to use.

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Robert Boland

I didn't I had to use some persuasion occasionally to get what what was right. So baseball is becoming a big business. The 20s are a golden age of sport. 1919 is the eve of that. And the players and gamblers and the art and the Jazz age all collide in this movie.

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Jonathan Hafetz

I'm also, you know, I'm struck by the low salaries because players, even decades after people like, you know, you know, I was like even Yogi Berra, like 30 years after work over the summer. They had like outside jobs. That doesn't change for a while.

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Robert Boland

Players don't really catch up until the advent of the union. And just kind of as an interesting aside, when Marvin Miller took the executive director position of the union, the average Major League Baseball player made $19,000 a year in 1967, when he retired from the executive director position, it was 225, and now it hovers somewhere in the 3 to $4 million range, with the Empire the owners, getting smarter about how they pay through the success of time.

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Robert Boland

But it's a remarkable, remarkable change. And if you think about it that way, from about $4,000 a year in 1900 to about $19,000 a year in the 1960s, that's not a lot of progress in salary.

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Jonathan Hafetz

No, not at all. And the way the film describes it, the players who agreed to throw the series, including White Sox star pitcher ATC code by David Stratton, thought they were being underpaid and exploited by their owner, the White Sox owner Charles Comiskey.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

You said if I won 30 games this year, there'd be a $10,000 bonus. So I think you owe it to me.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

All right. How many games Mr. Scott won for us this year? 29, sir.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

You had kids bench me for two whole weeks in August. I missed five starts.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

We had to rest your arm for the series.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

I would have won at least two of those games. You know that.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

I have to keep the best interests of the club in mind.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

Eddie, I think you owe me that bonus.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

29 is not 30, Eddie. You will get only the money you deserve. Anything else?

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

No, Mr. Comiskey, and that's it.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So you talk a little about the baseball salaries at the time, but was Comiskey better or worse? Or about the same as the other owners?

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Robert Boland

I think history would sort of show that Comiskey was certainly probably more enlightened than the other owners. He had a championship level team. He had access to a big market. He was competing for a city to some degree. So he was in the business better than most are. But again, in the business for a 20% more than others were not exponentially more.

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Robert Boland

We won't confuse him with 1970s or 1980s era George Steinbrenner.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Was he like, 1970s era Charles Finley?

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Robert Boland

But Finley better than Finley? But he had a dynasty and, wanted to keep it going and, you know, would try to do well. But again, he had no real pressure from the marketplace to pay players. And that that, I think, is such an important piece of the entry point to this film that we don't think about today or look back on today.

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Brett Kaufman

Yeah. And just talking about the film for, for a moment, I mean, obviously the book that Arsenal wrote and the film that sales made really rely heavily on, this idea that it's really Kominsky is a villain, he's underpaying them, and it's almost like you're sympathizing with the players that they're just not getting what they deserve as these big celebrities, and it's understandable that they would seek a big payday.

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Brett Kaufman

But as Bob explained it, that wasn't really the truth of the matter. When it comes to the real motivations for the fix.

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Robert Boland

It was easy money, right? That was ultimately the issue. We could take advantage of this and the other extraordinary parallel of this was we're living in this world right now, that for a hundred years, betting was the original sin of sports. The thing we feared most. Now, in every sport we're inviting betting in, and we just mark the Super Bowl in Las Vegas to show you how much that's changed.

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Brett Kaufman

The other thing about and Bob probably knows this history really well and better than I do, but there was just a regular amount of game fixing going on in baseball and other sports during this time period, and there were even rumors that the Cubs had thrown the previous World Series. So I don't think the average fan, or especially the in the industry sort of person, was surprised at all to hear rumors about what was going on in 1919, and even came out to Comiskey himself.

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Brett Kaufman

Had heard rumors before the fix even happened that this was going to happen. So I'm sure we'll get to the modern implications later. But it is kind of amazing after you see Landis come down so hard, really ridding the game of gambling, you know, until the last few years, and now you can't watch a baseball broadcast without seeing gambling thrown at you on the ticker and everywhere else.

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Brett Kaufman

So it really is an amazing thing when you think about it in context and rewatching this movie in today's environment. I think it was really, really enlightening.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, it's striking to see how kind of normalized gambling was, and not just gambling among spectators with players, but fixing of the games. It didn't seem I was out of the blue or extraordinary then, as it might today, although as we'll get to, maybe that will change as the more gambling takes over sports.

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Robert Boland

Baseball certainly lends itself to some sort of white level of fixing or gray level of fixing, because there are so many games. Games don't have that highest significance, and who wins the pennant most often. And the teams in particularly bad weren't terribly evenly matched across the big leagues that you could see a level of corruption kind of come into this.

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Robert Boland

We're almost seeing a parallel of that now in an interesting way, with NHL coming into college sports at nil jokingly stands for now. It's legal. It's always been a level of corruption that's existed. Now it's been unearthed and declared, okay. And so I think this is one of the interesting parts, that this was something that was floating in and around the sports for years and now was sort of unearthed and light was shown on it.

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Robert Boland

And the leagues were absolutely desperate to bury it as quick as they could.

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Brett Kaufman

Yeah. Bobby mentioned the sort of inventory of baseball, you know, naturally leads to the more possibility of sex and games. But baseball is kind of interesting, too, because one, it is hard for one player to really control an outcome. So you do kind of need a conspiracy like the Black Sex scandal to actually ensure that the gamblers get what they want.

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Brett Kaufman

And as we saw in that famous example, that didn't actually happen in all every single one of the games. The other is the centrality of the pitcher. Obviously, the pitcher is the one who really can control matters, and that tended to be the decisive factor during the Black Shot scandal as well. But you also mentioned how hard it was to get caught.

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Brett Kaufman

And I think sort of the natural futility of the average baseball player really speaks to that. If you go over five, you know, odds are you probably weren't going to go for five, maybe once or five, you know, even a superstar. So baseball is this weird confluence of a type of game where a fix is very hard to detect and certainly hard to pull off as well.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Right? I mean, even, you know, great pitchers are different every day, so sometimes it's hard to know if it's a bad game. I mean, I think in a very micro level you could try it. You can look at what they're throwing in, the speeds and the velocity. Maybe you can think they're taking something off, but it's not going to be immediately visible to the naked eye.

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Jonathan Hafetz

They don't have to do much against a pitcher to affect an outcome. In the opposite direction.

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Brett Kaufman

Yeah, one pitch, especially in a tie game, that could be everything. Obviously, with all the cameras and the data science that they have going on now, everybody would on Twitter be saying, this guy can been taken off something, a curveball or it doesn't look right. But, you know, that would likely point to an injury. So there's a lot more scrutiny.

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Brett Kaufman

I would say, Bob, I don't know. You probably have a good perspective of the biggest protection against that today is the salaries. I mean, these guys don't need to go take a rest and place a bet on the other team in the way that they might have, even during the Pete Rose era. So, you know, I think that tends to be the one thing that gives you sort of a sense that none of these guys are really going out of the way to fix a baseball game, especially in the major leagues these days.

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Robert Boland

It would certainly take a lot more than small money to do this and to risk one's career. Although, oddly enough, we keep seeing examples of fixing activity out there for people that would never or should never be involved in them. Whether it's that they think it's easy money where they think they won't get caught or they're just addicted to gambling, it still sort of surfaces periodically.

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Robert Boland

You know, just this past year, eight NFL players and I think really of the eight who were caught really are going to lose their career except for one. So the fact that it's out there still and an issue is worth revisiting this story which tells it so eloquently.

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Brett Kaufman

And Bob, I'm sure you saw the story of the Arkansas baseball coach who helped facilitate some wagers during the college baseball season last year, which, you know, was one of the more alarming and direct examples. You know, in the modern day that that we've been talking about.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. And I'm thinking back to Michael Jordan, the highest paid athlete in sports at the time. During the Bulls run, he's barely making it back for the championships because he's in Vegas. Is gambling.

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Robert Boland

We talk a lot today about that year in baseball and time off that that Jordan took. And I think an innocent expectation is that he had played a god awful amount of basketball, playing through the finals a number of years, playing an Olympic Games. On the flip side, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that Michael Jordan is a about as competitive an inveterate bettors one can find, and there is some thought that this was a finessed activity to give him a break from the game and to give him a break from the people who may be trying to get hooks on him.

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Robert Boland

Because of that. I'm hesitant to call it an addiction because I'm sure he would deny it, but the idea that love of the game and passion for betting, which was pretty obvious by teammates and others, was to give him a bit of a break.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Brad is not only a Cubs fan, but as a Bulls fan, I've got to let your spot.

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Brett Kaufman

Yeah, I mean, you know, of course there's always been the rumors. As a lifelong Jordan fan, I of course recognize who's, notorious and in some ways delightful, you know, gambling activity. He's just one of the greatest competitors ever, especially on the golf course and at the card table, for sure. I tend not to believe the rumors that he was rushed out of the league.

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Brett Kaufman

You know, there was a lot going on for him personally. His father had been murdered, as everyone knows, and so I tend to believe in that sort of humanistic side of the story. But the fact that those rumors continue to flame, I think, speaks a lot to who he was as a competitor and certainly a lot of his taste.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Going back to the White Sox. Okay, the black socks and 1919, one of the issues in control of players was the reserve clause. And that's talked about in the movie. What was the reserve clause and how did it work?

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Robert Boland

The reserve clause was essentially a contract continuation clause that allowed owners to renew a contract after the expiration of the contract for an additional year. But the way it was interpreted at that time is it meant an additional year and an additional year and an additional year without ever letting the athlete out of contract. So an athlete really had very little choice but to play for the team that owned their rights.

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Robert Boland

They could perhaps withhold their rights by not playing for a trade, but ultimately that was really going to be rare, and only a handful of players had that kind of power. So from about 1901 to the end of that 1975 five, with an arbitration free agency or the ability to change teams in baseball was absolutely limited, the only way you could really change teams is to be traded, or you could ultimately get caught by your team.

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Robert Boland

But more, more likely than not, that you could have your salary cut arbitrarily and you could be renewed to contract years long after the expiration of any agreement. But the only impetus to sign a longer term contract that was being offered to you is the idea gave you some security against injury. Over my shoulder, I just pointed the wrong way is Curt Flood, who ultimately fought that system to the US Supreme Court and lost.

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Robert Boland

Flood doesn't win. It's one of their most famous cases. And the Supreme Court takes an entire punt on that case. But ultimately, in an arbitration, Marvin Miller is able to win an interpretation from an arbitrator named Peter Seitz, who's long since passed, but cites interpreted a clause in Andy Messersmith contract and, ironically, was seeking a new trade clause.

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Robert Boland

He wanted to stay with the Dodgers and interpreted that the reserve clause could only last a year. It was a one year, one time renewal as opposed to a forever renewal, and that really brought the age of free agency to baseball. A remarkable change. And that really is the thing that drove the salaries up even greater, exponentially greater.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Now, I think they need to make that movie the Curt Flood story. I feel like it's it's so important.

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Robert Boland

It's such a piece of the fabric of the 60s and 70s because it's such an African-American player, had experience racism. Playing on an on a successful integrated team doesn't want to get traded to Philadelphia.

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Jonathan Hafetz

And so in the movie, the Black Sox players are first are indicted some time after the World Series. As the story start to percolate, there's public attention. They're indicted for conspiracy to defraud, and they're tried. In Chicago in 1921, three of the players apparently had testified about game fixing to the grand jury. But despite that, the players are acquitted.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Now, the film suggests that this grand jury testimony mysteriously disappeared, although, as I understand it, was recreated from stenographers. Notes. But in any event, despite this evidence, the players are acquitted. What explains the result and anything significant about the trial?

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Robert Boland

Jury nullification.

00;20;57;23 - 00;20;59;03

Jonathan Hafetz

Chicago style.

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Eight Men Out Dialogue

Three signed confessions. That's a tough hand to beat. This is Chicago, my friend. Anything can happen.

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Robert Boland

I don't have a deeper view of that other than I think it is difficult, as was pointed out earlier by Brett, sort of is the idea that this conspiracy wasn't a very tightly wound conspiracy. It was a very ad hoc conspiracy with different players operating in different levels in different places. So the idea that the most famous of the players, Shoeless Joe Jackson, took money but didn't actually act to throw games, at least according to this part, shows that it was difficult to prove and there was enough other basis to give reasonable doubt to a jury that might have been inclined to like the players.

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Robert Boland

Anyway.

00;21;44;09 - 00;22;12;10

Brett Kaufman

I tend to buy the nullification theory. I mean, the trial itself was notoriously a circus, which I think is nicely portrayed in the film. Stills does a good job of capturing sort of the the like, entertainment value of a courtroom trial in the 1920s. Really? Well, the Chicago Tribune famously reported that the scene that covers the credits of the film, where the players are celebrating and, you know, a restaurant, celebrating their acquittal.

00;22;12;12 - 00;22;41;08

Brett Kaufman

Famously, the Tribune reported that the jurors were celebrating in another room, and they eventually all joined the party together. And so that just gives even more credence to the idea that these were beloved ballplayers. The record in the case was sort of a mess. There was a leaking going on throughout from the grand jury and all kinds of stuff, and I think the simplest explanation is that the jurors simply identified with the players and didn't want to put them in jail.

00;22;41;11 - 00;23;01;28

Jonathan Hafetz

And so after the trial, it looks like everything's okay. Right? They're going to go back. There's the players you said are celebrating, fans are celebrating. But then the commissioner's appoint federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to become the first commissioner of baseball. They give him this absolute control over the sport Bob talked about earlier to restore its integrity.

00;23;02;00 - 00;23;25;12

Eight Men Out Dialogue

We felt that with your record of service and with the high esteem the public, we need a commissioner. Someone outside of baseball would have certain powers, absolute power, absolute powers won't work any other way. People won't believe in absolute power. Well, anyhow, we felt that the man that cleaned the Reds out of the country during the war was the right man to clean up baseball.

00;23;25;14 - 00;23;42;00

Eight Men Out Dialogue

We are prepared to offer you a two year cut lifetime contract lifetime and worried about his job under play favorites. You gentlemen don't want that lifetime contract. Seems I'm back in court in five minutes. Gentlemen, let's talk salary.

00;23;42;02 - 00;24;07;27

Jonathan Hafetz

So, despite the acquittal at the trial in 1921, Landis bans permanently all eight men from baseball, a punishment later defined by the baseball Hall of Fame to include banishment for consideration in the Hall of Fame, and all later requests for reinstatement were denied. So what led to Landis being put in this position to his decision? And did he really save baseball?

00;24;07;27 - 00;24;10;29

Jonathan Hafetz

As I was led to believe when I was growing up.

00;24;11;01 - 00;24;21;11

Robert Boland

I want to put that question to you too, is civil libertarians. I love your perspective on creating an unchallengeable, authority to act in their own judgment.

00;24;21;13 - 00;24;43;11

Brett Kaufman

Yeah. I mean, that most famous line from his speech, regardless of the judgment of juries, you know, obviously baseball is a private enterprise. And it is interesting seeing how strong and how much power he had as commissioner compared to today's game, where Manfred is really seen as and even most recent commissioners have been seen as sort of working for the owners at their behest, at their pleasure.

00;24;43;15 - 00;25;12;04

Brett Kaufman

Whereas with Landis, they really were trying to get somebody who could rule them with an iron fist. There was so much competition among them and so much disarray in the game that they really wanted somebody to come down hard. You know, I'm super sympathetic to the stories of guys like Shoeless Joe and Buck Weaver, who claim they didn't have anything to do with this and really didn't have a chance to put on any defense before the commissioner before being banned, and very sympathetic to the sort of posthumous cases for their inclusion in the Hall of Fame.

00;25;12;04 - 00;25;31;21

Brett Kaufman

Absolutely. But in terms of what Landis said, I mean, Landis, he seems like a really interesting guy there. There could be a really cool movie made about him, as well. He presided over one of the first antitrust trials and actually imposed a fine of what today would be like $1 billion on Standard Oil. That was reversed by the Seventh Circuit.

00;25;31;27 - 00;25;59;16

Brett Kaufman

And he also presided over the trial that I think would become the famous federal baseball club. The National League case. Bob, you probably know way more about that than I do. But so he was kind of involved. The other interesting thing about him becoming commissioner was he continued to be a judge, and he made about eight, ten times what he was making as a judge, as commissioner, which kind of shows you the relative financial situations of those two, situations at the time as well.

00;25;59;16 - 00;26;02;19

Brett Kaufman

So, Bob, I you probably know a lot more of that history than I do.

00;26;02;22 - 00;26;23;29

Robert Boland

Well, I think you set it up perfectly. Landis negotiates pretty strongly for his power and kind of knows this, but he had also come on the radar screen of the owners in deciding against the federal leagues and trial court, the players union antitrust claim. And there's sort of that whisper that he'd done the right thing for the owners before.

00;26;24;06 - 00;26;49;19

Robert Boland

So Landis is this incredible vector of vectors, of contradictions. His father was a Union Army general. He's named Kennesaw Mountain after the battle in which he loses his arm. Probably lost his arm, except Kenesaw Mountain Landis was one of the people that kept the racial barrier up in baseball. He is the good government guy, but it never seems like he has any problem hanging out with the Lords of baseball and and managing them.

00;26;49;26 - 00;27;17;26

Robert Boland

And yeah, he was successful in negotiating the power to rule over them. Now, it's also kind of important to think that we didn't have a centralized control structure. Each of the leagues had a president, but there was no commissioner structure and there was no centralized business structure for baseball. They did protect each other's territory. They respect each other's players rights only by kind of what would be described now is ultimately it antitrust conspiracy.

00;27;17;29 - 00;27;40;21

Robert Boland

But that was business enforced. Landis set up a judicial branch. He set up a Supreme Court level review over that which persisted in the lineal commissioners. It only ends when, Fay Vincent in the 1980s is. And I know Vincent a bit, I've been lucky enough to be this company's a very charming, very smart man and had a lot of good ideas.

00;27;40;21 - 00;28;07;15

Robert Boland

Except his good ideas were too great for the owners of baseball to stomach at that moment. So they ultimately replaced him. They said, look, we didn't hire you anyway. You were named commissioner after Bart Giamatti died. Suddenly. We don't really want you running it, and we're going to pick one of our own to run baseball. And that was Bud Selig, who continued to be an owner and ultimately gave up his team to be commissioner, but ultimately they just picked one of their own.

00;28;07;15 - 00;28;31;02

Robert Boland

And I think we see trends where the commissioner's office is reinforced in times of trouble and then diminished in times of good power. And for me, the only parallel is the internecine fighting of the crowned heads of Europe. Everything I know about professional franchises I learned from European history, and nobody wants to behead an owner. The idea of banning an owner is something that you know is like Charles the first.

00;28;31;02 - 00;28;51;18

Robert Boland

We don't want to touch that one. So it's it's a fascinating story. And Landis is a facet if kind of horrible. Look at character. He's so austere. He's so pretentious. He's such a horrible guy in modern terms. But he was able to negotiate a structure where the two leagues thought they were in a lot of trouble, that they would lose the confidence of the public.

00;28;51;18 - 00;29;09;22

Robert Boland

And when you're in trouble, you accept structures you wouldn't do in the normal circumstances. I'm kind of reminded, talking to some of the people who were at Penn State in the peak of Sandusky. I came along later and occupied the position for the second time. But most colleges haven't adopted one of those because they don't want that person there.

00;29;09;24 - 00;29;29;05

Robert Boland

They don't want somebody governing them or even talking to them about integrity. They want to talk about winning and making money. So it's an interesting concept that the position was created in a crisis. So it takes a crisis sometimes to create it. On the other hand, as Brett said, it's turned into a really effective managerial structure. And the commissioner now is really just the chief operating officer of the sport.

00;29;29;12 - 00;29;55;11

Robert Boland

And to some degree, if you look at Roger Goodell in football, the human shield for the owners, I'll take on your foibles. Don't look at you. Look at me. So it's an interesting one. And for me, I can see I'm like James Joyce thinking about a pub song when I see this movie. For me, it's really the beginning of the governance structure of professional sports in the United States that separates our sports, particularly from the European model, where they're clubs.

00;29;55;14 - 00;30;14;11

Brett Kaufman

Yeah, that's all fascinating. Makes a lot of sense. I mean, the other thing that just continues the run through, I think, from the Landis decision to today, is the way that the business of baseball sees players as more disposable. You know, the clubs and baseball are the thing that go on, and are important, especially to the central elements in the league.

00;30;14;11 - 00;30;30;23

Brett Kaufman

And you saw with the Seelig report during the steroid era and on that, you know, starting with Landis saying these are the best, some of the best players in the league and we can do without them and ended up being correct on that in the long term. But it is interesting to see how Landis sort of disposed of them in one fell swoop.

00;30;30;27 - 00;30;37;25

Brett Kaufman

The owners went along with it and saw it as in the best interest of the game themselves, for their own legitimacy and business success.

00;30;37;27 - 00;30;56;20

Robert Boland

And it'll be 50 years and the advent of a really strong union before they claw back some of those rights. So the reserve clause was really a powerful force, actually. It's kind of funny if you think about Marvin Miller. We talked a lot about Marvin Miller. I guess he was born in 1918 is the only thing that makes him relevant to this.

00;30;56;22 - 00;31;19;11

Robert Boland

Miller wasn't able to seek free agency in his first several collective bargaining deals, so all he could do is do blocking and tackling in the traditional labor subjects. So even today, baseball has some of the best benefits, some of the best retirement benefits in their union, of any union, in any setting. And it's largely because he did so much early work on blocking and tackling before he could take on the reserve clause and bring about free agency later.

00;31;19;17 - 00;31;35;11

Robert Boland

But it's such a different world. But to think that what happens here in 1919 persists across sports throughout the century, and the position of the commissioner is even, is even in many ways as strong or stronger today, just questionably more restrained with regard to owners.

00;31;35;13 - 00;31;53;23

Jonathan Hafetz

The film talks a lot about all the consequences, too, of this structure that you described being kind of put into place, particularly towards the players. Right? I mean, you have Gandalf, right? Who's sort of like the ringleader among the players. No problem that he's banished. Right? They raise the question, the kind of timeless question about Shoeless Joe Jackson.

00;31;53;28 - 00;32;24;21

Jonathan Hafetz

You know, one of the great players of all time still think he has the third highest lifetime batting average in baseball history, but behind type of and Rogers Hornsby and apparently in the book, as an off spot from 1963, he admitted some key facts, including from the 1920 grand jury records and the proceedings of Jackson's successful 1924 lawsuit against Comiskey for back pay for the 1920 and 21 seasons, indicating maybe Jackson's involvement was unclear, but nevertheless, Jackson is banned from baseball and Jiomart.

00;32;24;24 - 00;32;48;24

Jonathan Hafetz

But Giamatti, former MLB commissioner, refuses to reinstate Jackson, later claiming it's now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a present day review with an eye towards reinstatement, meaning that Jackson's not in the Hall of Fame, which prompted a overwhelming bipartisan resolution from the US House of Representative praising Jackson's achievements in an era of faltering bipartisanship.

00;32;48;24 - 00;33;03;28

Jonathan Hafetz

Right you have it there. And Manfred, the MLB commissioner, refused to most recently overrule Landis. So I don't think it's about Jackson or about Buck Weaver, played by John Cusack, who also seems to have been treated somewhat unfairly in terms of his involvement being banned from baseball for life.

00;33;04;04 - 00;33;26;10

Robert Boland

Well, that's kind of the thread that's really sort of the narrative thread of the movie. It's really that it's really sort of the Buck Weaver story who's a grayer character. Right? Jackson sort of appears in and out of the film. You know, it's interesting. I have this constant debate with another sports law professor out there. Is there a substantive and fundamental due process over in sports versus is it just the process which is due?

00;33;26;10 - 00;33;48;01

Robert Boland

And I sort of believe and maybe I'm a radical in the sense I believe, that in the course of American law and American legal history, there is a fundamental element of fairness and due process that's entitled in all things. So I agree with the minority or the just the chief judge in the Brady Deflategate case. It isn't just what you negotiate, it's that you negotiate for fairness.

00;33;48;08 - 00;34;03;21

Robert Boland

And I think that's one of the things that is really important in kind of cognitive sizing. The treatment of these guys is do they get that level of fundamental fairness in any hearing or procedure or where they just pronounced out? And we basically built the stadium on top of.

00;34;03;24 - 00;34;24;17

Brett Kaufman

That's well said. And it does seem like that's what happened to these guys in one swoop. Without any real process at all. The challenge that at the time and, you know, the record is not 100% clear on every little detail of this, but it does certainly seem that Jackson and Weaver have a good case that they didn't actually throw any baseball games during the World Series, so I've always had a soft spot for those guys.

00;34;24;18 - 00;34;53;13

Brett Kaufman

I'm tend to be a big hall type, even despite people's flaws. I think part of the history of the game that people like Shoeless Joe and Buck Weaver should be in the hall. So I do think it's really a tragedy that we still haven't been able to accept that in today's day and age. You know, recent debates about who should get in to the Hall of Fame after the steroid era probably worked against these historical figures because it sort of brought up this idea, again, that there's sort of a moral purity test to getting in the hall of Fame for baseball.

00;34;53;13 - 00;35;17;08

Brett Kaufman

And so I think that probably did work against them in the end, though, obviously the two things are different, but they're they're close to the related. And then I think, again, because it goes to the integrity of the game. And I think as we started talking about the beginning and the presence of gambling now in the game and in all of sports, I think probably hearts there cause because I think there's going to be a lot of alarm bells out there about saying it was okay.

00;35;17;08 - 00;35;34;27

Brett Kaufman

And you can make the argument the other way that if it's okay now to watch gambling about baseball during a game on television to broadcast for the team, then what's the big deal? Letting these guys back in to do something that was being done all over the game at the time. But I have a feeling that the way it'll work out is definitely the other way.

00;35;35;00 - 00;35;55;15

Brett Kaufman

Just to go back to the film for a minute, the way sales puts sportswriters in the story as sort of the moral compass, I think, is really, really interesting, and especially to compare that to the steroid era, where the loudest voices condemning the use of steroids were sort of the big names in the press and sportswriters sort of standing up for a clean game.

00;35;55;17 - 00;36;15;17

Brett Kaufman

And I think you can compare the two eras a lot, because Bud Selig has rightly, I think, been blamed for fostering an environment where steroids were ignored by the ball clubs or the league at the time, and the same could be said of gambling at the time. I mean, as we started talking about setting up the context of this movie, this was going on all the time, and the rumors of it were not secrets.

00;36;15;17 - 00;36;36;14

Brett Kaufman

And it sort of took this big event. And then really, the happenstance of how the grand jury gets into this through investigating a regular season Cubs Phillies game, they get into investigating the World Series, and that turns into an occasion to sort of label them at these dirty players and and even the name Black Sox, which really is about making the game dirty.

00;36;36;17 - 00;36;48;10

Brett Kaufman

So it is really interesting to see the role of sports writers in the film, how that role is like The Conscience of Baseball was reprised. And I think a lot of sports writers do sort of take on that mantle when it comes to these kind of questions.

00;36;48;13 - 00;37;09;27

Robert Boland

That's a fascinating point. That writer is are our arbiter of what's right and wrong when they're in many ways the most fallible. At the risk of taking it to another film, about baseball, I think a little bit about the natural in this context, to sort of expose the writer at the end with the idea, do you ever play ball back?

00;37;09;27 - 00;37;35;21

Robert Boland

So it's like, no. So the idea that the writers were, were these purity figures, I think is exactly accurate, but I also think it's exactly twisted, too. They're also creatures of maintaining their own realm and power and and are willing to feed at the same time off the people they write about in our stars. And I think, again, perfect point.

00;37;35;24 - 00;37;55;25

Robert Boland

It came up in the context of another investigation, but so many other investigations do. And if you think about it, what's the first thing a gambler wants to do to get himself off in a case? I'll give you a bigger conspiracy. I'll give you a better or bigger investigation. Fixing a regular season game. Now they fix the World Series.

00;37;55;25 - 00;38;24;07

Robert Boland

Watch. And if you're in that space, having been a player agent for a while, player agents are always happy to give you another player agent who's cheating or doing something bad. Coach a little bit of the same way, but it's interesting to think about that. That was exactly what was going on. And the power of writers, you know, the newspaper industry was enormous, that the writers represented various different content perspectives in that period of time, and that their power was dramatic.

00;38;24;07 - 00;38;42;11

Robert Boland

And so I think it's a fascinating time where the media's largely print radio hasn't really hit the stage. Newsreel footage is sort of, at best, nascent, and it's all live, and it's all described to us in daily newspapers. So I think the power of those writers is really extreme, and they've tried to hang on to it across the board through history.

00;38;42;13 - 00;39;01;06

Robert Boland

I also think when we talk a little bit about just the idea of the Hall of Fame, and I have a unique Hall of Fame angle, I don't think Joe Jackson should ever be diminished by going into the hall. He's poetic now without it as the rightful exception, and I think he's caught up too much in our time now about the political debate about Pete Rose.

00;39;01;11 - 00;39;25;12

Robert Boland

Rose obviously is with us. Rose is obviously a scoundrel and a liar in every terrible thing, and I think he now is a product of racist tropes. To that Rose, the scrappy, tough, overachieving white guy is somehow more deserving of the Hall because he was a scrappy, overachieving white guy, as opposed to African-Americans of his era who played with greater skill and a whole lot more decency.

00;39;25;18 - 00;39;34;16

Robert Boland

So I think that's an interesting it's almost a Trumpian meme right now. That Rose in the Hall is a part of that. And I think they're an extremely linked right now.

00;39;34;18 - 00;40;02;14

Brett Kaufman

Yeah, it's a great point. I just to go back to the sportswriters for a moment. You know, you mentioned they had their own interests and world going on and then pressures and incentives going on at the same time. I believe the character Studs Terkel plays Hugh Fullerton, I believe. I mean, at least what I know of this is that he was tipped off to this by his friendship with some of the gamblers involved, and that's why he sort of became on the lookout for what was going on, because, you know, either as sources or just operating in the same milieu, sort of knew these people.

00;40;02;14 - 00;40;17;18

Brett Kaufman

And because he is part of this world, it's an open secret that baseball games are being fixed. He sort of was alerted to the whole situation, which I think speaks to your great point about the writers themselves. They take up this mantle, but they're not all white knight in shining armor themselves.

00;40;17;20 - 00;40;46;01

Jonathan Hafetz

And Pete Rose for a second. So Pete Rose is banned and baseball sites rule 21. Right. So rule 21 says any player, umpire or club or league official or employee who shall bet any sum whatsoever on a baseball game in connection with which the better has a duty to perform, shall be declared permanently ineligible. Right. So this is the rule that was cited to ban rows and rows agrees to be banned in return for not making a formal declaration about whether he did or didn't bet on baseball.

00;40;46;03 - 00;41;11;03

Jonathan Hafetz

Now, the rule is it's still around. But as you were talking about earlier, at the outset, there's a huge increase in gambling today around sports, right? Baseball and other sports. After the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Murphy versus NCAA, which invalidated perhaps, sports gambling has grown vastly in size. It's $115 billion now, and sports gambling is legal in 38 states.

00;41;11;03 - 00;41;31;20

Jonathan Hafetz

Tons of advertising about sports betting, proliferation of digital betting platforms. I including a book in the Washington Commanders Stadium, if I'm not mistaken, in football and the Super Bowl was in Las Vegas. So let's talk about sports betting today. We've got rule 21. In baseball we've got the norm. Gambling is verboten by players. And yet it seems like sports are a wash in betting.

00;41;31;22 - 00;41;58;02

Robert Boland

It's steroidal to the industry right now. This has pumped up an already extraordinarily wealthy industry in American professional sports. And it's all new money. And it's all coming in to the media that covers it or to the leagues themselves. And because the leagues are really smart now and have gotten collective bargaining agreements out seven, eight, ten years, the players are barely tracking this and catching up.

00;41;58;02 - 00;42;21;00

Robert Boland

This is newfound money for owners either. Whether it's thought of as a third party related party transaction or a non-playing revenue transaction, the leagues share revenue, it's all new found money, and it may be the thing. Interestingly enough, it seems baseball in the future is baseball sort of on a downward trajectory with media rights, carriage and other issues.

00;42;21;00 - 00;42;48;26

Robert Boland

So it's a fascinating story that we're in this space. The one thing everybody says about legalized betting, widespread legalized betting, is it has the potential to at least self-police with a line and betting surveillance. And one of the other things that happened to me at Penn State, I had taken over a school that was on probation, is that it paid out $70 million in fines to the NCAA, about a half billion dollars of tort actions and damages and legal fees.

00;42;49;01 - 00;43;08;28

Robert Boland

And suddenly a year or two later, sports betting becomes legalized in Pennsylvania. And we asked the state of Pennsylvania to have a one year moratorium on that legalization. They said, now you could make it better. And you new Jersey had a lot less handle. So I'm making them betting on you. So we've let our desire for money to expand our care about betting.

00;43;08;28 - 00;43;27;28

Robert Boland

And we send a lot of mixed messages. We educate poorly. And I'm not singling out the college space, but even the professional leagues educate poorly. And we have real challenges in this space as to both the legality and the morality of how we came up. Sports betting product. Although I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon.

00;43;28;01 - 00;43;51;14

Brett Kaufman

I mean, I can just speak about it from the fan perspective. I am aware of betting I enjoy a little sports gambling. I certainly knew family friends that had a bookie that call up with little code, you know, in the Bahamas or whatever. But that was a very small little business. And seeing it on television every day, the thing that hits me the most is the speed with which it took over all the leagues just saw a payday and started warming up to it.

00;43;51;14 - 00;44;12;10

Brett Kaufman

But the speed with which it really took over. You have alternate broadcasts on ESPN that are about gambling. You have ESPN offering bets on games that it is broadcasting. I mean, so, you know, while I understand the sort of self-policing this is all sort of highly regulated kind of argument, I think we have no idea where this could leave, just given the presence of it.

00;44;12;13 - 00;44;46;25

Brett Kaufman

In the modern game and especially, you know, when you think about possible scandals going forward, who I think, being pressured to participate in something like that are the players, especially in baseball's structure, where, you know, we don't have the reserve clause, but you belong to a team under a maxed out contract for seven years. And so that, I think, is where the most pressure would be for a player to take an under the table payday to do something, you know, equivalent or similar to what's portrayed in the movies, because those are people who are frequently performing at the level that is the most valuable to the team and yet are compensated.

00;44;46;25 - 00;44;53;09

Brett Kaufman

What you know most of us would think is very well, but not really relative to what their peers are making for the same kind of performance in the game.

00;44;53;12 - 00;45;19;13

Robert Boland

Now, Brett's totally right. The idea that the leagues have used the analytics to get players down to the controllable early years of their career, and to really take away mid tier earners. There are superstar earners and there are low tier earners. There aren't as many mid tier earners as there used to be in any sport, and that takes away some of the stability of the sport in a lot of ways.

00;45;19;16 - 00;45;49;02

Robert Boland

And I think the other thing that we're seeing in this current wave of sports betting, which isn't true in the movie, is the amount of proposition betting, betting that doesn't involve the outcome of the game, but is often within control of a player or within the control of a couple of players. And that was always my fear. Overseeing an education program in betting in a league that had no money, college sports was the idea that could we figure out a prop bet that didn't affect the game, that I could game with my friends and start to make money?

00;45;49;08 - 00;45;57;20

Robert Boland

That would be hard to trace. And even with good surveillance today, it's very hard to trace prop bets and prop bet manipulation.

00;45;57;22 - 00;45;59;25

Jonathan Hafetz

What's a good example of a prop bet?

00;45;59;27 - 00;46;17;00

Robert Boland

I'll give you the best one that I can think of as a proposition. Bet will be in time and circumstance in a game. I'll miss the next free throw. I can still be a 91% free throw shooter, and I will miss the first free throw. The second half. And my friends know I'm going to miss my first free throw in the second half every time.

00;46;17;02 - 00;46;33;21

Robert Boland

You're not going to pick that up in a pattern for a long period of time. The only way you'll probably pick something like that up when you get to it is you'll pick it up off a large number of bets being placed on that somewhere. Unusually so. It's only the betting line that does it, and baseball lends itself to you.

00;46;33;21 - 00;46;52;15

Robert Boland

Next batter will you hit a double hit a triple hit a single, strike out? And so there is a lot of manipulation, as you've been talked about earlier, the frustration of baseball, where failure is the norm at least 66% of the time, unless you're a real big All-Star, it's easy to allow those failures to just sort of count out.

00;46;52;18 - 00;47;08;09

Robert Boland

So I think that's one of the challenges that we're going to see out there in space. And because sportsbooks and betting entities are offering anything that's televised as an order of to bettors, baseball has a lot of potential orders. It's bets to place.

00;47;08;12 - 00;47;39;29

Brett Kaufman

You know, baseball is an anomaly in the major sports leagues just because of the number of games that are played in the regular season, which I think a lot of people draw the line from that to the loss of viewership among younger people and the loss of attention spans in the modern world. And so it is particularly dangerous in baseball, where there is sort of a temptation, I think, to the powers that be to sort of gear the game towards more engagements on a betting level where they're losing engagement on sort of just a pure fan level on a day to day basis over the summer.

00;47;39;29 - 00;47;42;00

Brett Kaufman

So I think you're totally right, Bob.

00;47;42;02 - 00;48;04;06

Jonathan Hafetz

Sounds like you are unlikely to get a repeat of the Black Sox scandal, where you had the top players involved and this kind of conspiracy, albeit a loose one. There were like two different sets of gamblers that were involved. But, you know, the big players have too much to lose between the propositional betting and or some lower level player that doesn't make as much at the low end that's being controlled in the contract system, doing something to affect the outcome.

00;48;04;06 - 00;48;09;25

Jonathan Hafetz

That's where you'll see a kind of incursion of gambling into affect the outcome of a game, potentially.

00;48;09;27 - 00;48;35;23

Robert Boland

Yeah, I think that's probably correct. Although I'm still struck that a college baseball coach who makes $550,000 a year was willing to have a friend place bets against his own team and ultimately got caught and lost his job quickly and will never be employed again, as far as I can imagine. So betting offers these very strange incentives to people and very strange books to people.

00;48;35;26 - 00;48;55;04

Robert Boland

And that's one of the things that, again, I think, I think why the movie and why Landis at least can be judged semi favorably, at least with regard to this, is it was needed to wipe out all those books and incentives that if you bet it comes at the cost of your career. And we've now take it away.

00;48;55;04 - 00;49;01;23

Robert Boland

All that was all that clarity of lies. Not that I'm suggesting in any way that all punishment should be capital for all crimes.

00;49;01;25 - 00;49;25;16

Jonathan Hafetz

The movie appears almost a little bit quaint now in some respects, in terms of the level of gambling. I mean, it was a big problem at the time, but they're able to get these key members of the team to throw the series. But the in terms of this, the amount and the quantity and the ways in which they're able to bet and the platforms, it is from a different era, but it really seems more now than it did, you know, 20 years ago.

00;49;25;18 - 00;49;51;24

Brett Kaufman

Well, also the incentives of the major, you know, the financial figures, like the mobsters involved. I mean, today Arnold Rothstein would own FanDuel. You know, he wouldn't need to fix the World Series. He'd be in the house and he'd be making his money the straight up way. So it is a totally different world than existed back then. And the incentives of not only the players but of the figures involved with, you know, orchestrating the fix don't really map on to the modern world anymore.

00;49;51;26 - 00;50;15;17

Robert Boland

It's the size of money. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And the alternatives for gamblers, I mean, there still are traditional gamblers, but the idea that we live in a regulated space and betting is such a part of it, it's remaking all our structures. Even Las Vegas casinos are changing their mechanism. It used to be slot machines forward because slot machines were moneymakers with very little cost.

00;50;15;23 - 00;50;28;20

Robert Boland

Now it's sportsbook forward because you don't even have to do anything. You don't need a dealer, you don't need maintenance costs. You basically serve some people some food and let them watch games that they can lose money on product you don't even have to create.

00;50;28;23 - 00;50;32;05

Jonathan Hafetz

So anything else. But I'm trying to think there's anything else about the movie.

00;50;32;07 - 00;50;54;17

Robert Boland

I'm an enormous sales fan. He's a very stylized director. You know, the return of the Secaucus seven meet one so many of the actors used again and again, and his use of strap haired, who always steals the show and almost everything he does. But sales putting himself in the movie is is its sort of narrator. And conscience is interesting.

00;50;54;21 - 00;51;17;10

Robert Boland

I think kind of the unionized wobbly that he typically is is is unique. It sort of shows through because it is at least a case of exploitation of the players, and he wants to feature that show of it. So I think it's a wonderful film. Is it the best of the baseball movies that sort of follow it and surround it pretty close?

00;51;17;12 - 00;51;43;28

Robert Boland

I mean, Field of Dreams, the natural, well, a few others all come out in fairly quick succession and probably convince the studios we should all be making baseball movies. It's poetic at a time. In the late 1980s, now, baseball had a couple real high points in the mid 80s and then sort of slid downward through the next decade, going to cable and not having the same traction, and has probably been in a bit of decline ever since the Red Sox high point in the early 2000.

00;51;44;01 - 00;51;58;08

Robert Boland

Breaking their streak was probably a break from it, but it's a fascinating movie that it started a trend to baseball and a rediscovery of the poetry of baseball and the poetry of this kind of original sin against innocence, too.

00;51;58;10 - 00;52;14;14

Brett Kaufman

Yeah, I've always loved the movie. I grew up watching it, and I remember remaking parts of it on a camera. My brothers, you know, the Satan. So Joe scene, you know, we played that a bunch of times. So I've always loved it. I mean, I think the casting you mentioned of Bob at the casting in this movie is absolutely incredible.

00;52;14;14 - 00;52;39;23

Brett Kaufman

There's just so many just dead on performances. Cusack as Buck Weaver and Clifton James as Charlie Kaminsky is fantastic strength. And you mentioned Michael Lerner as Rothstein. Chris Lloyd is in there as Bill Burns. Just a great performance. One of my favorites is Richard Edson as Billy Mustang, who's, one of the gamblers, and he's famously one of the parking lot guys.

00;52;39;23 - 00;52;58;29

Brett Kaufman

Dealers. They are. So this is from my childhood. Growing up in Chicago was a giant, for a guy who had some very small film role. So I love him. Kid Gleason, a great baseball manager from John Mahoney, does a really great, warm performance. D.B. Sweeney is Jackson. Check. Daniel. Totally. Michael Rooker plays the villain really well there.

00;52;59;01 - 00;53;27;01

Brett Kaufman

He also makes a great appearance in JFK as part of, Kevin Costner's team. And then you got Studs Terkel and Sayles himself as the writers and as you mentioned, the moral compass and got sales singing that parody song, on the train car, just sort of shaking the finger at everybody, which is a fantastic scene. So it's a really well-made movie, you know, great period piece, good music and really, really excellently rewatchable for sure.

00;53;27;01 - 00;53;31;03

Brett Kaufman

Anytime that's on some kind of TV, whatever. I'll just watch it.

00;53;31;05 - 00;53;58;07

Robert Boland

It's worth probably mentioning the other piece of it now. I may have a little bit of an affection for it. Is a Columbia athlete because Eddie Collins is not the protagonist, to not be antagonist, but clearly antagonistic to these guys. And it's the reckoning in a way of class and culture in America. Here's the star player, the clean player, Collins actually pointing a finger at guys who smoke and chew and drink.

00;53;58;07 - 00;54;05;10

Robert Boland

And it fits this era. You know, you might as well point a few of them out as Catholics or immigrants or something else. It picks that.

00;54;05;10 - 00;54;06;21

Jonathan Hafetz

Up really neatly.

00;54;06;21 - 00;54;29;10

Robert Boland

And and it picks up Collins is this guy who, with an Ivy League degree, the Hall of Famer, a guy who's really a guy from the last year of baseball, still hanging on, is unique in that way. There was there was a time that Columbia had the most graduates or most former players in the Baseball Hall of Fame that ended shortly after Gehrig went in, and Gehrig was paid by his college baseball coach to sign with the Yankees.

00;54;29;10 - 00;54;42;10

Robert Boland

So, you know, not exactly the clean process there, but it's a unique one to think about and one that I kind of hang on as a jock who wore Columbia blue. So I love how Collins is sort of the last century still talking.

00;54;42;13 - 00;54;50;04

Jonathan Hafetz

So interesting. And you can see those class dynamics play out and it intersects with the whole gambling plot. And who agrees to throw the game and who does a.

00;54;50;06 - 00;55;14;28

Brett Kaufman

Couple other things. This is neither here nor there, but one of my favorite scenes is when Rothstein goes into like, the big I don't know if it's a beer hall or a train hall, and they're just playing the game on a giant board with like, you know, moving a guy to first base or whatever. And there's a guy sort of reading a ticker tape and every time I see that, it's just amazing that here we are, you know, 100 years later and I watch a baseball game like that on my phone once in a while, on Game Pass.

00;55;14;28 - 00;55;34;24

Brett Kaufman

So it really is incredible to just see how it is exactly the same. The other thing I wanted to mention is just how big of a cultural stamp this event had on America. I mean, it really is unbelievable. And I think the story of it, the mythology of it, the martyrdom of Shoeless Joe, as Bob referred to earlier, I think it is.

00;55;34;24 - 00;56;09;22

Brett Kaufman

It starts a huge part of American culture. And a couple examples of that from films in Godfather two, I'm in Wrath. Truth is his name after Arnold Rothstein, because he was so impressed with what he did fixing the World Series. So that's an amazing, I think, entire film sort of connection to the event. And then another really, I think random reference in film and TV is when Roger Sterling goes on his famous LSD trip during madman, he sees the Black Sox scandal playing out in front of his eyes and it is one of the most random things to enter, you know, the modern cultural lexicon.

00;56;09;22 - 00;56;15;20

Brett Kaufman

But I found it really charming and amazing.

00;56;15;23 - 00;56;40;04

Eight Men Out Dialogue

What are you looking? I'm looking at me. He looks through a series 1919 the Black Sox. Even know. But I'm there. Look at the stars. Model T, model T, my late model T, I can't see it.

00;56;40;06 - 00;56;51;04

Brett Kaufman

You know, I don't go back so far, but for people born around that time, I think, you know, in the pre television era, especially Black Sox had a huge sort of place in American culture. And it continues to this day.

00;56;51;06 - 00;57;17;28

Robert Boland

You can't be more spot on. I mean for me, it's always my first read of The Great Gatsby coming into this. And the story of how he fixed the World Series, the idea that every great literary figure or writer or author or story seems to center around this moment as one of a loss of national innocence. Ironically, a nation that had been through a civil war and at that point been in the First World War.

00;57;18;00 - 00;57;29;20

Robert Boland

It seems ironic that a baseball game could do that, but there is still a poetry and a belief around the innocence of baseball for a lot of fans, and I'm one who feels it. And I'm pretty darn cynical.

00;57;29;22 - 00;57;31;23

Brett Kaufman

Guilty as charged as well.

00;57;31;26 - 00;57;49;08

Jonathan Hafetz

But it's been great having you both on to talk about the movie, talk about baseball. And, you know, we've got to plan a field trip down to the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum, which I discovered in doing research for the podcast exists in Greenville, South Carolina. So I think we should make a plan and head down.

00;57;49;10 - 00;57;50;13

Brett Kaufman

That sounds very cool.

00;57;50;17 - 00;57;53;02

Jonathan Hafetz

Brett. Bob, thanks again for coming on the podcast.

00;57;53;06 - 00;57;53;26

Robert Boland

Thank you.

00;57;54;02 - 00;57;54;19

Brett Kaufman

Thank you both.