![]() He learned a lot from a teammate, a minor-leaguer named Mickey Rutner, whose motto was "fuck 'em all, big and small". Being Jewish, he discovered that the professional game was a "hate-ridden", competitive world, but in the end "the game was the thing, the only thing". He played for St Albans, Vermont, in the amateur Northern League before signing for the Philadelphia Phillies for two seasons, 19. A bright student and fine athlete, he transferred after a year at Williams College to Swarthmore, outside Philadelphia, where he became captain of the baseball team, good enough to earn money playing as Johnny Elliott for a semi-professional team in nearby Chester. ![]() Young Eliot learned to sew suits, and later to sell them. Eight Men Out draws its particular power from his own love of the game, and his sense of the pressures that would drive its best players to betray it.Īsinof was born in Manhattan, where his father worked in his grandfather's men's shop. Asinof's work, including his fiction, are about outsiders forced into difficult stands against those with power. Although his writings dealt with much else besides baseball, the book uses the game as a window into America's social problems. The writer Eliot Asinof, who has died aged 88, will be best remembered for Eight Men Out, his 1963 study of baseball's "Black Sox" scandal, when members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to deliberately lose the World Series. ![]()
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