Baseball bigshot of Chicago: Charlie Comiskey (1859-1931)
Charlie Comiskey, the baseball bigshot of Chicago had Crosserlough connections, as historian Jonathan Smyth informs us in his latest Times Past column...
Frank Sinatra is crooning his heart out on the radio and the shopkeeper listens momentarily, everyone becomes aware, ‘Chicago Chicago, that toddlin’ town.’ Ol’ blue eyes seems to pay homage to the ‘windy city’, named after its windstorms, or could it be a reference to her early citizens which some other smart-ass labelled, ‘full of hot air.’
Founded in 1830, Chicago City was to develop into the world’s largest grain port by 1854. The early twentieth century saw more violence and by the 1930s, lawlessness from gangsters like Al Capone and John Dillinger’s reign of tyranny raged wildly during the prohibition years. Fear was soon forgotten, it seems, and like Bonnie and Clyde a romanticised version of Al Capone took over the public imagination. After all, who hasn’t watched and dare I say, ‘enjoyed’ a movie like ‘ The Untouchables’ which tells the story of a gangland bootlegging operation.
Chicago, was a beautiful place of opportunity for Irish Americans, people like Charlie Comiskey, or his father John who left County Cavan, thinking of a better life, and then finding success, through sweat, hard work and luck.
Charlie Comiskey progressed from a major league baseball player to manager and owner of the Chicago White Sox of which he was also a founding member. By reputation, Comiskey was a notoriously stingy, and folk nicknamed him ‘Commy’, and the ‘Old Roman’. It was always going to be a life of baseball because as a kid he obsessed over the game. A copy of Sports Illustrated, from 1958, tells us that old Commy, ‘exerted a profound influence on baseball’ and ‘as a player’, he was the first person ever ‘to follow the now obvious but then startling practice of moving away from first base to field a ground ball’.
Charles Albert Comiskey was born on August 15, 1859, the son of John and Mary Comiskey. John Comiskey came from Crosserlough, County Cavan, and his wife was a native New Yorker. The Comiskeys lived in Holy Family parish, Chicago. Charlie’s father was born in 1826, at Crosserlough, and first went to New Haven Connecticut, USA, in 1848, where he got into logging and after a few years he moved to Chicago to manage the freight arrivals on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company. Ten years into the future John started work with a distiller called Shufeldt and Croskey, and then went to the cattle yards at Fort Wayne, Indiana, to supervise operations. An interest in politics matured, and Comiskey joined the Democratic Party, earning himself a nickname ‘Honest John’. He began to help out with the Internal Revenue Service, under the Andrew Johnson administration. John’s next job was as a bookkeeper in the inner-city treasurer’s office, serving Chicago City Council for over a decade before his nomination as the councillors’ first President when the role was introduced.
Charlie Comiskey
As a young man, Charlie’s apprenticeship to a plumber began. His spare time was taken up with his first love, baseball, and so he played with several of the professional teams in Chicago. He worked hard, tried different jobs, and drove a brick delivery lorry for the building crews employed on the construction of the ‘fifth Chicago City Hall in the early 1870s. At the same time, his baseball career moved up a gear, and he found himself on the field as a ‘pitcher’ until an injury placed him at ‘first base.’
In 1882, Comiskey joined the professional baseball league, playing for the St. Louis Brown Stockings, and became the Brown Stockings manager, winning four championships between 1885 and 1889. The legendary Charlie Comiskey, played with and managed teams like the Chicago Pirates and the Cincinnati Reds (and here, we should mention a famous American baseballer, Andrew Jackson Leonard, born in Finea, Co Cavan, who, made it big with the Cincinnati Red Sox).
Comiskey invested heavily in baseball, buying the Western League Sioux Cornhuskers, Sioux City in 1894 which he moved to St Paul, Minnesota and renamed, St. Paul’s Team. In 1900, the team went to the southside, and were renamed the White Stockings when they joined the American League. The name was soon shortened to the trendier sounding ‘White Sox’. Comiskey remained the team’s owner from 1900 until his death in 1931.
In the early years, they won American League pennants and two world series, but when Comiskey lavished the cash on building Comiskey Park in 1910, it was by the same token that he lost the support of his players whom he paid a pittance of what other teams were getting. Comiskey was apparently such a tight wad, that he got each player to wash their own uniform to save on overhead costs.
Comiskey’s association with baseball lasted 55 years and even though the Black Sox scandal of 1919 saw his name somewhat tarnished, he still recovered and was posthumously added to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. It was said that the eight players who helped ‘throw the 1919 World Series’ to the Cincinnati Red Sox in the Black Sox scandal, were fed up with Comiskey’s tight-fistedness and what they did was a symptom of team morale.
Aftermath
The White Sox stayed under Comiskey family control after Charlie’s death and Sports Illustrated, an American publication, exposed a clash between the third-generation owners on February 24, 1958, in an article, ‘The Comiskey Affair’. Chuck Comiskey and sister Dorothy were feuding, ‘on the grounds that a family fight is more fun than a free-for-all’, stated the magazine.
A list of the owners who came after Charlie Comiskey are given: Firstly, his son, J. Louis Comiskey inherited the team but he died in 1939. Then, Grace Comiskey, the widow of J. Louis took on the trustees of her late husband’s estate, who had attempted to sell off the White Sox, but luckily, she regained ‘absolute’ control of the team ‘for herself and her family’.
According to Robert Creamer’s Sports Illustrated article, the feisty Grace ‘bossed’ the White Sox from 1941 until her death in 1956. Her son Chuck then came into the fold, along with Dorothy as the owners of the White Sox, making the Comiskeys the ‘oldest family’ to own a baseball team.
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