Make no mistake: the villains of this movie are not the White Sox players that cheated or were accused of cheating or possibly cheated or merely have gone down in history as being cheaters. The villain here is Charles Comiskey, owner of the team. While falling short of actually condoning any cheating that actually was done by some members of the infamous “Black Sox” team, the prevailing theme is that they merely did what they had to do in order to get what their owner would not give them: full due and fair pay for turning in an impeccable season of ballplay. Comiskey actively sought to deny bonuses, failed to come through on promise rewards and at every turn took advantage of the revenue his players produced for him without even coming close to providing them a fair and equitable distribution based on their labor. Eight Men Out becomes a textbook case of Marxist concepts like worker alienation, exploitation of the working class by the ownership class and the ultimate result that Marx predicted when those worker become enlightened: rebellion and insurrection.
