Comiskey Park (35th Street & Shields Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) was the ballpark in which the Chicago White Sox played from 1910 to 1990. It was built by Charles Comiskey and was the site of four World Series (one of which was played by the Chicago Cubs due to lack of seating at Wrigley Field) and over 6,000 major league games.
The park was built on a former city dump that Comiskey bought in 1909 to replace the wooden South Side Park. Comiskey park was very modern for its time, being constructed of concrete and steel and seating 29,000, a record at the time. Briefly, it retained the nickname "The Baseball Palace of the World". The park's design was strongly influenced by Sox pitcher Ed Walsh, and was known for its pitcher-friendly proportions (362 feet to the foul poles, 420 feet down the middle). Later changes were made, but the park remained more or less favorable to defensive teams. For many years this reflected on the White Sox style of play: solid defense, and short, quick hits.
The first game in Comiskey Park was a 2-0 loss to the St. Louis Browns on July 1, 1910. The last game at Comiskey was a win, 2-1, over Seattle on September 30, 1990. The White Sox lost their first-ever night game to St. Louis in 1939, 5-2.
From the 1970s until its demolition in 1991, Comiskey was the oldest park still in use in Major League Baseball. Many of its known characteristics, such as the pinwheels on the scoreboard (see photo), were installed by Bill Veeck (owner of the White Sox from 1959 to 1961, and again from 1975 to 1981). For thirty years from 1960 to 1990, Sox fans were also entertained by Andy the Clown, famous for his famous Jerry Colonna -like elongated cry, "Come ooooooooooon, go! White! Sox!". Starting in the 1970s, Sox fans were further entertained by organist Nancy Faust who picked up on, and reinforced, the spontaneous chants of fans who were singing tunes like, "We will, we will, SOX YOU!" and the now-ubiquitous farewell to departing pitchers and ejected managers, "Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey-hey, GOOD-BYE!" And before he became an institution on the north side, Sox broadcaster Harry Caray had became a south side icon. At some point he started "conducting" Take Me Out to the Ball Game during the seventh-inning stretch, egged on by Veeck, who (according to Harry himself) said that the fans would sing along when they realized that none of them sang any worse than Harry did!
Comiskey Park was officially renamed White Sox Park from 1962 to 1975 after the last Comiskey stockholder had sold their remaining shares. When Bill Veeck re-acquired the team, the man who was both visionary and traditionalist restored the name Comiskey Park... and took out the center field fence, reverting to the original 440-plus distance to the wall... a tough target, but reachable by Rich sluggers like Allen and Zisk and other members of a team that was tagged "The South Side Hit Men". They were long removed from their days as "The Hitless Wonders". During that time the ballpark also featured a lounge where one could buy mixed drinks. This prompted some writers to dub Comiskey "Chicago's Largest Outdoor Saloon".
For a number of years, off and on, the Chicago Cardinals football team called Comiskey Park home when they weren't playing at Normal Park or Soldier Field. The stadium also presented boxing matches, including World Heavyweight Championship bouts featuring Joe Louis, Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. One of its more ignominious events was Disco Demolition Night, a fiasco that threatened instead to demolish the ballpark itself.
From a modern perspective, it seems that the White Sox are always second fiddle to the Cubs, and likewise the Cardinals were second fiddle to the Bears before they moved on to greener pastures. It is surprising, then, to discover that the White Sox were the more popular team in town for pockets of their history. In the early years of Comiskey Park, the White Sox regularly outdrew the Cubs. The throwing of the 1919 World Series seemed to take the starch out of the franchise for decades. But the Sox were a contender during the early 1950s and into the mid 1960s, and once again outdrew the perpetually inept Cubs. During the last 8 years of its existence, Comiskey's annual turnstile counts reached the 3 million mark 3 times, including the final season when the team contended for much of the year before fading behind the powerful Oakland_Athletics.
Bill Veeck once remarked that "There is no more beautiful sight in the world than a ballpark full of people!" On its best days, Comiskey was stuffed to the gills, with 55,000 people or more lining the aisles and even standing for nine (or eighteen) innings on the sloping ramps that criss-crossed behind the scoreboard. The nearly-fully enclosed stands had a way of capturing and reverberating the noise without any artificial enhancement. As someone once remarked, "Wrigley Field yayed and Comiskey Park roared."
Comiskey was demolished in 1991, a process that started from behind the right field corner, and took all summer. It was downright painful for old-time fans to watch. The last portion to come down, fittingly, was the center field bleachers and the "exploding" scoreboard. The demise of the old park made way for its successor – across 35th Street – of the same name (later renamed U.S. Cellular Field). Some Sox fans believed that the move was unnecessary, but owner Jerry Reinsdorf was at the time threatening to move the club to Tampa Bay (the stadium now called Tropicana Field was constructed for this purpose), and the local and state governments went along by giving them funds for the new stadium.
'Old' Comiskey's home plate is a bronze plaque on the sidewalk next to U.S. Cellular Field, and the field is a parking lot.
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Last updated: 05-07-2005 09:37:23
Last updated: 05-13-2005 07:56:04
