Let me concede here at the beginning that Charlie Comiskey was an S.O.B. He was a player and a manager, usually at the same time, in the early days of organized baseball, where he gained a reputation as the leader of rough, brawling clubs that were largely quite successful. His final winning percentage as a manager was over .600.
After the end of his on-field career, Comiskey became the owner of the Chicago White Sox . The story is he shortened the “White Stockings” to “Sox” so it would fit into newspaper headlines better.
Anyway, it was as a team owner that Comiskey really gained a reputation as a scoundrel. During the early part of the 20th Century, the White Sox were the most popular and biggest moneymaking team in baseball, but Comiskey wanted to hog the money all to himself and give as little as possible to the people who were generating it—the players. When it came to paying the players, Comiskey was a miser. And, in those pre-free agency days, players were in a take-it-or-leave-it negotiating position with their ball teams. They were paid what the owner decided they would be paid.
It does not in any way excuse the behavior of the cheating players who conspired with gamblers to fix the 1919 World Series, but it is significant that it was players from Comiskey’s White Sox who took $10,000 to throw the series, and almost brought baseball down with them.
But one thing that Comiskey did that nobody has an argument with: he built a great ballpark for his team. When Comiskey Park opened in 1910 on the South Side of Chicago, one prominent baseball publication called it “The finest Ball Park in the United States, which means the finest in the world.” This is especially remarkable when one considers that the site of the park had previously been the city dump.
In fact, Sox shortstop Luke Applying, who played the infield at Comiskey from 1930 through 1950, once heard his spikes strike metal and the game had to be delayed as a large copper pot was removed from the field and the hole filled in.
That wasn’t the only memorable moment in the history of Comiskey Park. This was the place where, in 1960, owner Bill Veeck (“as in wreck”) installed an exploding scoreboard that sounded like the South Side was under enemy attack every time a Sox player homered. And this was the place where, on July 12, 1979, a promotion called Disco Demolition Night got out of hand. Between games of a doubleheader with the Detroit Tigers, disco records were demolished on the field, and the crowd became so musically enthusiastic that a major riot broke out, the field was swarmed by a mob, and the Sox ended up forfeiting the second game to the Tigers.
Through all the craziness—and one more World Series and several Hall of Fame careers and All Star games—the White Sox played in the park that Charlie Comiskey built until 1991, when its age finally led to its replacement by a state-of-the-art field, built beside the old one. This new field was called, naturally enough, New Comiskey Park. Gradually the “new” was dropped and it became known, as its predecessor had been, as simply Comiskey Park.
So, to sum up, the Chicago White Sox have been in the American League for as long as there has been an American League—since 1901—and since 1910 have played in a facility called Comiskey Park.
Until this year.
When the baseball season starts, the Sox players are going to be coming to work at the same location. The infield, outfield, dugouts, and clubhouse are the same. But the corporate management of the White Sox have decided to sell the naming rights to Comiskey Park to a telecommunications company called U.S. Cellular.
Comiskey Park will be called U.S. Cellular Field.
This is so wrong that there is a very real possibility that it may throw the earth out of its orbit and send us all spiraling into the icy realms of interstellar space.
I say this, and I hope I’ve made this clear, not because Charlie Comiskey was a great man whose memory should be preserved as an example for our children. But he at least did have something to do with the Chicago White Sox and their history. The current owners of the team are perfectly willing to sell that legacy to the first telecommunications company that shows up with a checkbook, although to be, fair, they probably would have been equally happy to sell the rights to a chain of pawnshops or strip joints.
The White Sox owners should cast their minds back to last year when the Houston Astros became known as the laughingstocks who played at Enron Field. Other examples of this may occur to you, perhaps one close to where we live.
The more I thought about this, the madder I got. But then something occurred to me. Charlie Comiskey was such a skinflint, so blind to the idea that anything could be more important than money, that he would have been the first person willing to sell the name of his ballpark if it had ever occurred to him that he could have done so. I have no doubt that, in 1910, for the right money, he would have been perfectly happy to have his team take the field in, say, Lydia Pinkham Patent Medicine Park if sticking some ridiculous name on it would have enriched Charlie Comiskey.
So maybe in stripping his name from the park, the current owners of the White Sox are in a backhanded way paying tribute to Comiskey—by being as ignorantly blinded by money as he was.
I can’t wait for Disco Demolition Night II.