Asinof, Eliot 1919–2008

(Eliot Tager Asinof)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 13, 1919, in New York, NY; died of complications from pneumonia, June 10, 2008, in Hudson, NY. Minor league baseball player, novelist, and author. Asinof spent most of his life as a freelance writer, but he had entered the world of work with hopes of a career in professional baseball. He was hired by the Philadelphia Phillies organization in 1939, but an injury two years later ended his career before he ever made it from the organization's minor league team to the "big time." It was baseball, nonetheless, that formed the core of Asinof's writing career. Asinof was the author of the book (and coauthor of the screenplay adaptation) Eight Men Out (1963), the dramatic story of corruption in the 1919 World Series that tainted the Chicago White Sox for decades to come. The scandal ruined the careers of major league stars like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Happy Felsch, who had risked everything to rise above the stingy White Sox paychecks (the lowest in professional baseball) by negotiating with gambling interests to throw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Asinof's best seller linked him to baseball for the rest of his life, but it was only one of more than a dozen books that he produced in his career, and not all of them were about baseball. He wrote about other sports—Seven Days to Sunday: Crisis Week with the New York Football Giants (1968)—and about other events rooted in the year of the White Sox scandal, such as 1919: America's Loss of Innocence (1990). He also wrote true crime accounts and murder mysteries. He addressed topical issues in the novel Final Judgment (2008), which concerns college campus protests and President George W. Bush. His last book, completed in the year of his death but not yet published, was reportedly a memoir of his years in the army during World War II, when he served on Adak Island in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. To the very end, though, Asinof was remembered as a lifelong fan of professional baseball and the author of Eight Men Out, which was reprinted in 1977 as Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series, one of several reprints over the years. His last baseball novel was the thriller Off Season (2000).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, June 12, 2008, sec. 2, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2008, p. B6.

New York Times, June 11, 2008; June 12, 2008.

Washington Post, June 12, 2008, p. B7.