Ten Die of Heat as City Sizzles.”
Thus read one headline in the Tribune on July 1, 1910, the day Charles
”Old Roman” Comiskey opened ”The Baseball Palace of the World” amid 95-degree heat at 35th and Shields on Chicago`s South Side.
The opening of White Sox Park (it wasn`t called Comiskey Park for half a dozen more years) wasn`t the only news that day.
A Page 1 story described the outwardly cordial meeting between ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, back from an African safari, and President William Howard Taft at Taft`s summer retreat in Beverly, Maine.
Feeling between Roosevelt and Taft cooled, however. In 1912, Roosevelt opposed Taft`s re-election, bolted the Republican party and ran on the Bull Moose ticket, thus assuring the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
Also in the paper of July 1, 1910, a headline and subhead described how pioneer aviator Glenn H. Curtiss had provided the world a preview of warfare in the future:
”Curtiss Scores `Homer”` said the headline. The subhead explained:
”Drops 15 of 22 Projectiles upon Target Like Deck of Dreadnaught.”
Neither the summit meeting in Maine nor the birth of dive bombing mattered very much to 28,000 celebrants who turned out for the first game played in the largest and finest baseball park on Earth.
Brass bands played. Comiskey orated. So did various politicians. Fans and pols paraded from the Loop to the site of the huge kite-shaped park. It had been designed by a rising young architect named Zachary Taylor Davis. Four years later, Davis would design another park up at Clark and Addison on the North Side.
The gates opened at 1 p.m., 2 1/2 hours before gametime. Fans filled the double-deck stands between first and third and the detatched grandstand down the left- and right-field lines. Nearly all of them were male. Many wore straw hats. They marveled at the size of the place. Previously, parks seated only a few thousand.
The White Sox had the followers to pack the big park. As the ”Hitless Wonders” in 1906, they had stunned the city and nation by winning the pennant and upsetting the Cubs in the World Series. In 1907, they led the majors in home attendance, drawing 666,307 fans to their old park at 39th and Wentworth. In 1908, spitball pitcher Ed Walsh, moistening the ball with slippery elm bark he carried in his mouth, won an amazing 40 games.
These successes were enough to spring the Old Roman into action. For $100,000 he bought a tract of land near 35th Street. It had belonged to Mayor John Wentworth. It included a truck farm and a junk yard.
In October of 1909, Davis submitted his sketch of the steel and concrete kite-shaped park. Ground was broken on St. Patrick`s Day, 1910. An unexpected steelworkers` strike caused concern, but the park opened on time, July 1, 1910.
Construction costs neared $500,000. If that sounds cheap today, remember that a buck went a lot further in 1910 than in 1990.
Tickets to the opener cost as little as 25 cents. But if a young chap leaned toward a more romantic whirl for his entertainment dollar, he could board the Pere Marquette at the Wells Street Bridge at 8:15 p.m, sail to Waukegan and back, enjoy moonlight and dancing, and return at 10:45 p.m. Cost per person: 35 cents.
Walsh pitched for the White Sox in their debut in the new park. But his teammates were the guys who would go on to bat .210 as a team in 1910, and Walsh and the Sox lost 2-0 to the St. Louis Browns.
(Note: Curiously, the Sox were still Hitless Wonders when Comiskey Park celebrated its 80th and final birthday on July 1, 1990. Though no-hit by the Yankees` Andy Hawkins, the Sox won 4-0.)
If one had a time machine capable of transportation back to any time in Comiskey Park`s first decade, he`d be almost certain to find two conditions.
First, the White Sox would be managed by an Irishman. Second, Comiskey would be improving his club by acquiring the superstars who would make the 1919 ”Black Sox” one of the most gifted teams in baseball history.
Billy Sullivan managed the Sox in their last season in the old ballpark. Hugh Duffy was skipper in 1910-11. Nixie Callahan was manager from 1912-14. Finally, after Clarence ”Pants” Rowland had managed for four years and won Chicago baseball`s last world title in 1917, Kid Gleason took over the infamous 1919 club that contained eight men who were banished for life for fixing the World Series. Gleason managed the team until 1923.
Comiskey Park itself underwent few changes in its first 15 years. It has been a pitcher`s park all its life because of its spacious dimensions. Originally, the park measured 363 feet down each foul line and 420 to the huge wooden scoreboard erected in dead center.
Then as now, the Sox lacked home run punch. They played a full month in their new home before a Chicago man homered. He was utility man Lee Tannehill. His grand slam was his only homer of the year and one of only seven hit by the entire 1910 team.
But times were a-changing. In the four-year span, 1912-15, the Sox acquired pitcher Eddie Cicotte from the Red Sox, catcher Ray Schalk and pitcher Red Faber from minor-league teams in Milwaukee and Des Moines, second baseman Eddie Collins from Philadelphia and outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson from Cleveland.
These five stars led the team to the 1917 pennant and World Series. How good were the Sox in the 1917-20 era? Cicotte had a 90-49 record for the four years before he was banned for fixing the series. Faber won 254 games for the Sox. Collins (lifetime average .333), Schalk and Faber are in the Hall of Fame. Jackson, many old-timers contend, is simply the best hitter who ever lived.
Jackson`s .356 career average is topped only by Ty Cobb at .367 and Rogers Hornsby at .358. Homers were not fashionable in Joe`s prime, so he socked 21 triples for the 1916 Sox. He was batting .382 in 1920 when he was kicked out of baseball.
What was a ballgame like in Comiskey Park in the heyday of Shoeless Joe & Associates? South Side fans got a taste of it this summer when the Sox donned 1917 uniforms, sold 5-cent bags of popcorn, heard the field announcer deliver starting lineups through a megaphone and watched humans hang numbers on a scoreboard.
But none of this could begin to repaint the beligerent picture of White Sox baseball circa 1917. In John P. Carmichael`s book, ”My Greatest Day in Baseball,” Buck Weaver, scrappy third baseman during 1912-20, zeroes in on Comiskey Park for Game No. 5 of the 1917 White Sox-New York Giants World Series.
”We went out to the park early and took files and sharpened our spikes until they were like razors,” Weaver said. ”We were going in there cuttin`. We talked to `em, and they raged at us; we called `em yellow and everything we could think of.
”We went into every base with our spikes in the air-and we reminded them how sharp they were. When they tagged us out, they`d grab the ball with both hands and slam it down on us. That was all right with us . . . ”
