Buck Weaver and Hap Felsch are young idealistic players on the Chicago White Sox, a pennant-winning team owned by Charles Comiskey - a penny-pinching, hands-on manager who underpays his players and treats them with disdain. And when gamblers and hustlers discover that Comiskey's demoralized players are ripe for a money-making scheme, one by one the team members agree to throw the World Series. But when the White Sox are defeated, a couple of sports writers smell a fix and a national scandal explodes, ripping the cover off America's favorite pastime.

When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.