When Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey died in 1931, some 1,400 people filled the pews at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in Hyde Park for his funeral. Another 600 spilled out onto the street.
“This was Chicago’s largest funeral,” Mary O’Malley, who researched Comiskey for her master’s degree, told Chicago Stories. “If he was such a bad guy, why is that the case? If he was supposed to be a crook and bad figure, how could that be? How could both things be true?”
Comiskey has often been painted as a villain in the story of baseball – a wealthy team owner who underpaid his players, cheated them out of bonuses, and made them launder their own uniforms. A “tightwad, a crook, very narcissistic, a capitalist, a shrewd businessman,” O’Malley said of his reputation. But many of these descriptions emerge from the myths that have been perpetuated by movie and book portrayals of the Hall of Famer. The real man, it turns out, is more complicated than those portrayals suggest.
Charles Albert Comiskey was born in Chicago in 1859 to Mary and John Comiskey, the latter of whom was an Irish-Catholic immigrant who made a name for himself as a Chicago alderman. Charles grew up playing baseball on the prairie and played in college before starting as a professional. Still in its early days, baseball was a game for “non-academic minded youth,” said O’Malley, so while Charles had a vision for what baseball could become, his father did not.
“Charles and his father, John, had kind of a fraught relationship,” O’Malley said. “I think Charles deciding to play baseball in such primitive, early form when he could have been a plumber in the post-Chicago Fire economy – he could have been set up, but he went against John’s wishes, which was probably not done very much in the community where he grew up.”
Comiskey played professionally as both a pitcher and first baseman for various teams, including independent teams in Milwaukee and Elgin and later the St. Louis Brown Stockings and the Cincinnati Reds, where he was also a manager. Comiskey is often credited as the first first baseman to play off the bag, changing the position to what we know today. He later purchased the Sioux City Cornhuskers, which he then moved to become the St. Paul Saints, and, eventually, the White Sox on the South Side of Chicago. Comiskey is also one of the owners credited with creating the American League. In Chicago, he built a dominant team.
“Comiskey was more powerful than a lot of other owners because he had helped start the American League,” Chuck Fountain, author of The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball, told Chicago Stories. “He was probably the best-known owner in the game.”
Comiskey the Villain?
With that power and notoriety came a certain reputation. Patti Bellock, the great-granddaughter of Comiskey, said when she was serving as a state representative, one of her colleagues referred to her great-grandfather as “one of the most hated men in baseball.”
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’” Bellock told Chicago Stories. “[He] did more for baseball than pretty much anybody else.”
Comiskey’s reputation was certainly tarnished by the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, in which eight players conspired to fix the World Series in exchange for payment from gamblers. Comiskey had heard rumors of a fix, so he hired his lawyer and private investigators to look into the matter.
“Comiskey was not looking to get to the bottom of the story so that he might expel the players and save the honor of the game,” Fountain said. “Comiskey wanted to know whether something was going to blow up that would prevent him from re-signing these players.”
The investigators didn’t find any concrete evidence, giving Comiskey plausible deniability, and so he signed them for the 1920 season. But when a Cook County grand jury investigation into corruption in baseball turned its attention specifically to the 1919 White Sox, “Comiskey, shrewd businessman that he was, decided that he would be the one to blow the lid off,” Fountain said. After Cicotte confessed to Comiskey and his lawyer, they urged him to confess to the grand jury.
“In the immediate aftermath, the players were the villains, because they had betrayed the ideals of American manhood, which they allegedly embodied,” historian Bill Savage told Chicago Stories. “Comiskey and the fans were perceived as the victims.”
The eight players were ultimately banned from baseball for life, and Comiskey’s dynasty came to an end. “He was disappointed after that. They said it just really broke his whole spirit, and for those last several years, he became a recluse,” said Bellock. A Chicago Daily Tribune article about Comiskey’s death in 1931 reiterated this idea – that he “suffered a broken heart because of those whom he trusted most” and he “died in the quiet of the north woods, alone except for the presence of his son and only heir.”
It wasn’t until later that stories – many of which are myths still repeated today – emerged that painted Comiskey as the villain. The 1963 book about the Black Sox Scandal, Eight Men Out, and the 1988 film of the same name played a key role in shaping what people think about Comiskey “because every good story needs a villain. And he was an easy one to target,” said O’Malley. The legend goes that the eight Black Sox players were angry at their boss for being treated and paid poorly. But according to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), the author of Eight Men Out relied heavily on anecdotal evidence, rather than facts.
“The legend has grown up about this club that they were all united in their hatred of Charles Comiskey, that he was the cheapest owner in sports,” Fountain said. “That simplifies the question.” In fact, according to the SABR, the 1919 White Sox had one of the highest team payrolls in the league. Any tension between Comiskey and his players likely had more to do with the boss-employee relationship. “Name me a business owner in any business, in any facet of American life, who did not want to maximize his profits out of that business,” Fountain said.
Comiskey, like any baseball team owner at the time, was a powerful boss, too. That’s in part due to the existence of the reserve clause, the economic model for major league baseball from the 1880s to the 1970s. The reserve clause held that players were bound to a team and could not leave for another team without permission.
“If the player retired or chose not to sign another contract or walked away from the game, he could not play anywhere else in organized baseball,” Fountain said. “All teams agreed to honor the contracts of those players held in reserve by another team.”
This gave owners like Comiskey the upper hand in contract negotiations. Many of the players, said Fountain, came from humble backgrounds. They didn’t have agents to represent their interests at the time.
However, the White Sox were among the higher-paid teams in 1919. One myth that dominates the story of Comiskey and the Black Sox is that of pitcher Eddie Cicotte’s bonus. According to lore, which was depicted in Eight Men Out, Comiskey promised Cicotte a bonus if he won 30 games, but Comiskey benched him when he got close to achieving that goal, leading Cicotte to pursue less honest sources of income. But there is no evidence to back up the story. According to another legend, Comiskey’s cheapness extended to the player’s uniforms. He supposedly forced the players to launder their own uniforms, leading them to look filthy. “The context of that is every team played in filthy uniforms. There were no laundries in the clubhouse” in those days, said Fountain.
Comiskey the Philanthropist?
The same 1931 Chicago Daily Tribune article on Comiskey’s death mentions that the priest delivering the sermon at the funeral mass described Comiskey as a man “who had been charitable to all with whom he had come into contact” – a far cry from his reputation as a miserly boss.
“He did a lot of important things that have been overlooked,” Bellock said. “His reputation of being cheap is wrong. His reputation of being tight was right, but his reputation of being generous is huge.”
When O’Malley began her research into Comiskey, she was surprised to find that Comiskey was a philanthropist. “Holy sh-t, he wasn’t an a--hole!” she joked. “What I found was that he was a huge philanthropist…to organizations that didn’t get a lot of attention and to marginalized communities.”
Comiskey financially supported the all-Black 8th Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, as well as Provident Hospital, the first Black-owned-and-operated hospital in Chicago. According to O’Malley’s research, after the city denied suffragists access to Grant Park for a parade, Comiskey offered up his ballpark as an alternative.
Villain or victim, Scrooge or altruist, Charles Comiskey was a savvy businessman who did a lot for baseball, but like any powerful boss, was likely not beloved by all. Comiskey’s contributions in his 50-plus-year career in baseball have hardly gone unrecognized: He was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939. According to his Hall of Fame biography, Comiskey often gave out tickets to young boys, and he once said, “The fellow who can pay only 25 cents to see a ball game always will be just as welcome at Comiskey Park as the box seat holder.” Bellock said about her great-grandfather, “Not only did he love the game of baseball, he loved the fans even more.”
One of the biggest pieces of his imperfect legacy was Comiskey Park, which he funded. It opened in 1910. When a new park was built in 1991, it retained Comiskey’s name. But in 2003, it got a new name, US Cellular Field, and was renamed Guaranteed Rate Field in 2016. When Comiskey Park was renamed the first time, Bellock said she was sad to see the name Comiskey taken off the park. A bronze statue of him in a bowler hat and bowtie stands in the centerfield concourse.
Said Bellock, “I have a lot of people that come up to me and say, ‘We still call it Comiskey’ – especially South Siders.”
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