The History of the Chicago White Sox - Part 1

         Usually, there’s not much of a theme to be found in the founding of a sports team. Most of the time, they just file the paperwork and start playing. The White Sox are different. They’re one of the founding members of the American League (AL), and the story of their origin is the story of the founding of the AL. A story of pure spite. 

In the early days of baseball, there was a fierce war to find out which baseball league would become the dominant one in the United States. The National League (NL) was the second attempt to create a unified league of baseball teams, doing so in 1876 following a failed attempt in 1871. The NL faced challenges from the American Association (1882), the Union Association (1884), the Western League (1885), and the Players’ League (1891). The National League defeated all of these rival businesses and by 1892 was mostly unchallenged. There were some other leagues operating, but all with the understanding that they were minor leagues, and that the NL was the one and only major league.

That didn’t mean that people weren’t still trying to beat the National League, though. 

In 1892, the Western League, which had ceased operations in 1888, was brought back. It played one season and then folded. It was brought back again the next year before folding again without playing a single game of the 1893 season. They tried again in 1894, and this time, they had a few aces up their sleeves. Ban Johnson, at the request of his friend Charles Comiskey, became the president of the Western League. Comiskey then purchased one of the Western League franchises, the Sioux City Cornhuskers, and immediately moved them to St. Paul, Minnesota, where they would be known as the St. Paul Saints. Then, they waited. 

Johnson and Comiskey hoped that the NL would grow complacent after facing no rivals for some time. It took until 1899, but the opportunity eventually came. After the 1899 season, the NL announced that it would be contracting from 12 teams to 8, cutting unprofitable teams in Baltimore, Cleveland, Louisville, and Washington, D.C.. 

In 1900, Charles Comiskey decided to move his Saints to Chicago. Before he did so, he had to get approval from Chicago’s preexisting baseball team, the Chicago Orphans, who would change their name to the Chicago Cubs in 1903. The Orphans came up with a list of conditions for the Saints. 

1. The Saints cannot use the word “Chicago” in any of their branding. 

2. The Saints cannot play their home games any further north than 35th street. 

3. The Orphans can draft two players per season from the Saints roster. 

Finding himself unable to brand as a Chicago team, Charles Comiskey decided to rename the Saints the White Stockings, a name that the Orphans had used from 1876 to 1889. This name was almost immediately shortened to White Sox. 

The White Sox had immediate success in Chicago, finishing the 1900 season with the American League’s best record. It was after that year when Comiskey and Johnson made their move. In 1901, the Western League, now called the American League, declared itself a second major league, equal to the National League. A rush of relocations, foldings, and reopenings left the AL with eight teams, six of which either shared a city with a National League team or occupied a market that the NL had recently left in their 1899 contraction. 

This is as direct of a challenge as possible and was set to start a war between the leagues and fierce rivalries in the cities where there were teams from both leagues. 

The key advantage that the AL had that allowed it to succeed where other rival leagues had failed was that they offered higher player salaries than the NL. This drew many star players to the American League, especially in cities where there was one team from each league. In Chicago, Cubs starting pitcher and future hall of famer Clark Griffith joined the White Sox as a player/manager in 1901. 

        Griffith was actually a close friend of Ban Johnson and the president of the closest thing the National League had to a player’s union at the time. He convinced many players to switch to the American League on his own. All this had to have infuriated the Cubs. The third clause of the White Sox’s deal was completely disregarded before essentially being reversed. The Sox were now poaching the Cubs’s best players. That 1901 Sox team finished the first season of Major League AL ball with the AL’s best record, winning the first ever American League Championship. There was no World Series, yet, though, so their season ended short of a trophy despite going as far as it could. 

In 1903, after two straight profitable seasons from the American League, many fans and star players jumping ship, and being outdrawn by AL franchises in all three cities where the NL and AL coexisted, the National League accepted that the American League was here to stay. Both leagues decided to have the teams that finished with the top records in each league to meet each other for an exhibition series of games to determine who the best baseball team in the nation was. They called it the World Series even though it had only American teams in it. 

In 1904, when the second World Series was set to be played, the National League’s New York Giants refused to face the American League Champions. They felt that they had already proven themselves as the best team in the nation by winning the only “real” major league. Those New York Giants were the last holdouts, though, and by 1905, the World Series had returned for good. 

Most of this part was spent talking about the American League as a whole rather than just the White Sox, and I might have gotten a little sidetracked. For those of you looking for more White Sox content, though, don’t worry. Once the World Series became a regular occasion, it was only a matter of time. 

And I couldn’t imagine a more perfect opponent.