Perhaps the most infamous sports scandal in history is the Black
Sox scandal about the fixing of the 1919 World Series. It has been
immortalized in a book by Eliot Asinof and a movie by John Sayles,
both entitled Eight Men Out.
The significance of the title is that it took eight men to fix
the game. The book and the movie both go into great detail about
how most of the players were persuaded by the participation of
other players. Because baseball is not usually dependent on the
performance of any one person, eight were needed to make the scheme
work. Even with that, the most famous of the eight-Shoeless Joe
Jackson, who was banned from baseball for life because of his
participation in the fix-hit .375 in the Series and made no errors,
so apparently his heart was not in the scheme.
Read the article here.