Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,918

This is the grave of Charles Comiskey.

Born in 1859 in Chicago, Comiskey grew up in the early Illinois elite. His dad was a long time Irish-American city councilperson, though seems to have been at least sometimes in odds with the Democratic political machine and tended to support reforms. Comiskey attended Catholic schools and then St. Mary’s College in Kansas. He played baseball out there and then went back to Chicago and played some semi-pro ball and just worked a bunch of construction jobs. I’m not really sure why he worked these blue collar jobs, but his father doesn’t seem to have supported him much if he was going to be messing around with baseball.

But what I do know is that he pretty much only cared about baseball. He started as a pitcher, but his arm went bad and so he moved to first base. He first made the major leagues with the St. Louis Browns of the American Association in 1882 and he was a pretty fair player for the next decade. He was a pretty typical guy of the dead ball era, a few home runs here and there but not much. Using Baseball Reference’s WAR stat, he was generally worth 1 or 2 wins a year, with a peak of 2.7 in 1887, when he managed to steal 117 bases and drive in 103 runs, despite only hitting 4 homers. He already managed most of these teams too. He did leave the Browns for the Chicago White Sox in 1890 and he was absolutely terrible that year, worth a -1.6 WAR which is totally unplayable. But hey, he was manager. Being terrible on the field never stopped late era Pete Rose either! He had an OK comeback year with the Browns in 1891, then struggled along with the Cincinnati Reds for three years before retiring at the end of the 1894 season.

Comiskey’s real interest was ownership though. He and some partners bought the Sioux City Cornhuskers in 1894 and moved them to St. Paul, in the Western League. Then in 1900, he moved that team to Chicago for a new Chicago White Sox team in the new American League. Thus they remain today. Comiskey owned the team for the next 31 years, until his death.

What this of course meant is what he is famous for–being such a cheapskate bastard of an owner that his players went dirty during the infamous Chicago Black Sox era. Comiskey did tend to have good teams, winning the pennant five times, including that dominant late teens team with Shoeless Joe Jackson that won in 1917 and 1919. Comiskey could put together talent but he was an absolutely tyrant. He forced his players to pay for their own uniforms to be cleaned. He agreed that if Eddie Cicotte won 30 games, he’d get a bonus. Then when Cicotte was about to hit that, he had his star pitcher benched so he wouldn’t have to pay out. He promised everyone a bonus for winning the 1919 pennant, which turned out to be flat champagne. I mean, you cannot overstate how much the players loathed him.

So it’s hard for me to criticize the White Sox players for throwing the World Series. I know the response to unbanning Shoeless Joe led to some consternation, including in these parts. But I don’t share it. I’m not necessarily arguing for this, but one can think of the players throwing the series as an act of worker resistance to a horrifyingly awful employer. Obviously the problem with that construction is that it also hurt the other workers, i.e., the players who didn’t get paid and who really wanted to win despite their scumbag boss. But again, if I had a boss that atrocious, I can’t say what I’d do if I had the chance to make some actual money for once.

Comiskey was surprisingly unscummy after word of Jackson and Cicotte and the others blowing the series for cash. He did send them mean telegrams, but then paid for quite good defense lawyers. Perhaps he saw that this was ultimately on him. Maybe if he had bought them good champagne instead of flat champagne, they’d have won him a Series. But he came around to Kenesaw Mountain Landis’ decision to ban all the players for life, even though he knew full well that the team would suck. Again, perhaps he realized he deserved this. I am probably giving Comiskey a bit too much credit here for self-reflection. After all, a man with some level of self-reflection probably would not have gotten himself into this situation.

The White Sox did suck after this too. For the rest of his life, Comiskey’s team was awful. They would not win another pennant until 1959 and mighty few since then too. In fact, they didn’t even playing meaningful baseball in September again until 1936.

Comiskey died in 1931. He was 72 years old. Of course his buddies had him put in the Hall of Fame in 1939. I guess there’s a case based on his contribution to building the American League. But there’s most certainly no case for him as a player or manager or especially as an owner. He’s one of the worst owners in the history of the game, though given Jerry Reinsdorf, possibly not the worst owner in the history of the Chicago White Sox. Now that’s a remarkable claim. But the White Sox, my God. In fact, Reinsdorf has been a terrible basketball owner too, but of course the Bulls had their run of some of the best teams ever. So you can evaluate Reinsdorf based on that if you want, but I’d rather evaluate him based on how he’s run his teams, especially without the best player ever and quite possibly the best General Manager in Jerry Krause ever too.

In conclusion, Shoeless Joe Jackson should be in the Hall of Fame because his labor conditions were so atrocious that it just made sense to take the bag. It was a form of labor resistance. Maybe not a very good or useful or productive form and it hurt his fellow teammates not taking the bag too (granted, Jackson had an awesome Series so that’s also part of the debate), but it is a form nonetheless. And if you think this argument is ridiculous, well, OK, I can see that too. But the whole Black Sox thing is a lot more complicated than a moralistic “how dare you besmirch America’s game” argument gives it often rests on in the public mind.

Charles Comiskey is buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Evanston, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the so-called Black Sox, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Shoeless Joe Jackson is in Greenville, South Carolina and Eddie Cicotte is in Livonia, Michigan. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.