CHICAGO WHITE SOX

If there are baseball gods, then the justice they mete out is both severe and long lasting — eighty eight years to be exact. Just ask the Chicago White Sox. Having fielded competitive teams in the first two decades of the 20th Century, the 1919 team intentionally lost the World Series in the infamous "Black Sox" scandal.

Charles Comiskey was both father and midwife to the White Sox franchise. A former player and manager, Comiskey purchased the minor league team in Sioux City, Iowa which he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1895. When the National League (the only major league at the time) contracted by four teams in 1899, Comiskey moved the Saints to the South Side in 1900 where they played a final Minor League season in the Western League. An agreement with the Chicago National League franchise forbids his team the use of the name "Chicago", so the "White Stockings", a nickname used previously by the team that would become the Cubs, were born. Working actively with Ban Johnson, they successfully established the rival American League in 1901 and the moniker "White Stockings" would evolve into the condensed version "White Sox" a few years later.

The White Stockings first game was an 8-2 win over Cleveland on April 24, 1901. They wound up with the junior circuit's best record that first year at 83-53 but with the World Series not yet conceived, there was no post-season play.

The White Sox next reached the top in 1906, with a team dubbed the "Hitless Wonders" for their paltry batting average of .230. No regular hit higher than .279 and no one came close to shortstop George Davis' team-leading eighty runs batted in. What carried the day for this team was a wondrous pitching staff whose names may be forgotten by modern day fans, but were very familiar to hitters of their era. Frank Owen (22-13, 2.33), Nick Altrock (20-13, 2.06), Doc White (18-6, 1.52 to lead the league) and Ed Walsh (17-13, 1.88) combined for a team ERA of 2.13, led the Sox on a nineteen game win streak in August (eight of the wins by shutout), and overall, won twenty-nine one-run games.

The Sox won the pennant by three games and then upset their cross-town rival Cubs in the only all-Chicago World Series ever played. The Cubs had pillaged their way to one-hundred sixteen wins that year (a record that still stands) but averaged only 1.5 runs per game against Sox pitching.

After some lean years, Comiskey went on a spending spree that netted him two of the game's top hitters — "Shoeless" Joe Jackson from Cleveland and Eddie Collins from Philadelphia — and one of the game's best pitchers in Boston's Eddie Cicotte. Blending with home grown talent, the Sox won one-hundred games in 1917 (the only Sox team to reach the century win mark) and dispatched the New York Giants in six games to win their second world title. No one at the time would have believed this would be their last championship in the 20th Century.

The players who formed the solid core of the 1917 champions also formed the rotten core for the 1919 Black Sox. They won the pennant by three games over Cleveland but lost to an underdog Cincinnati Reds team in the World Series. Suspicions about how the Sox played simmered during the Series, but the lid didn't blow until the following August, when Eddie Cicotte admitted what the players had done, implicating himself, Jackson, fellow pitcher Lefty Williams, Chick Gandil, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver, Oscar "Happy" Felsch, and utility infielder Fred Mc Mullin. When these other players also confessed, they were immediately suspended by Comiskey, and the Sox team, in first place on August 31, collapsed to second place. It should be noted that the 1920 team still managed to win ninety-six games and had four twenty game winners in Williams, Cicotte, Red Faber and Dickie Kerr.

The Black Sox were tried in Chicago and acquitted of all charges in 1921. This was not good enough for newly appointed Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who despite the jury's verdict used the players' earlier confessions to ban them from major league baseball for life.

The pall of the Black Sox scandal hung over the franchise long after the participants departed. The Sox played dismal, second division baseball over the next three decades, becoming Chicago's second team behind the Cubs. The best they could offer was the chance to see Hall of Fame players such as Luke Appling, one of the great hitting shortstops of all time, and pitcher Ted Lyons.

Bill Veeck took the reins of ownership in 1959, transforming the Sox from the "no-no" team of 1919 to the "go-go" team of 1959. Using a dynamic running game (Luis Aparicio and MVP Nellie Fox were the instigators), stellar defense and a great pitching staff led by thirty-nine year old Early Wynn (22-10, 3.16), the Sox ended a forty year pennant drought, the longest seen in either league. They lost the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games.

During the 1970's and 1980's, the White Sox brought Chicago some entertaining, if not always successful teams. They finally added power, known in 1977 as "The South Side Hitmen", to a lineup that for most of the century relied on contact hitters. The dearth of power and run producers in ChiSox history is evident in the fact that no White Sox outfielder in the 20th Century was elected to the Hall of Fame — a unique distinction for the franchise.

It was a trio of heavy hitters: Greg Luzinski, Carlton Fisk and Ron Kittle, all of whom hit at least twenty-five homers, that helped manager Tony LaRussa lead the Sox to the 1983 American League West title. The Sox also won back-to-back division titles in 1993-94 behind Frank Thomas (seventy-nine home runs in those two years) and Jack McDowell.

The baseball gods seemed to be angry at the White Sox stained legacy of 1919. They denied the team a World Championship for eighty-eight years, the longest drought in the American League — then the year of redemption arrived. The drought was over. Echoing the sentiments in Boston during the previous season's climax, generations of fans from all walks of life erupted in a jubilant celebration across the Windy City's south side after a 2005 World Championship. It was a win for the ages and the nineteenth four-game sweep in World Series history that gave the franchise its first World Championship title since 1917.