Baseball Movies: The top 5 characters ever? Who are yours?

Buck Weaver (John Cusack) in Eight Men Out (1988): Cusack plays the most unjustly damned of the Black Sox Eight as an idealist who loves the game.

At one point in the film, he sits with neighborhood kids talking baseball in the midst of the scandal, talking about feeling a ball “give” when a good swing is put on it. “Damn,” he says, “if you don’t feel like you’ll live forever.”

It is impossible to know whether or not “Buckie” Weaver was the same sort of idealist Cusack plays in this film, perhaps the most serious baseball film ever made.

We know, however, that Cusack does a good job portraying a player who really wasn’t “in the loop” of the planned scandal, and is outraged he’s lumped in with the Sox who threw the Series. One of his other memorable scenes is in the trial at which he and the others accused are acquitted.

He angrily demands a separate trial, and begins citing his statistics from the Series. One of his teammates shouts out the early 20th century equivalent of “Sit down, Buckie – nobody cares about your WAR.”

Buck Weaver is the central character in this film involving several MLB film characters as defined here. The actual player he’s portraying was, like Shoeless Joe Jackson, a player who may very well have ended up in the Hall of Fame. (Jackson would have been, of course, a consensus lock until the scandal if the notion of a Hall had existed.)

It’s interesting that the ordinarily tough-minded director John Sayles saw Weaver as idealistic as he is portrayed. On the other hand, Sayles has always portrayed the unjustly treated as just that, not just his MLB film characters.