I was shocked to see on the WGN Television News that my South Side heroes, the Chicago White Sox, are contemplating a move to either a new location in Chicago or the suburbs, or even to a different city, possibly Nashville. Their stadium lease is up in 6 years, and so this is probably not a surprise. Especially since back in the late 1980s, Jerry Reinsdorf (Swinesdorf to some) threatened to move the team to Tampa if he did not get a new stadium. He got one, built right across the street from Comiskey Park, which was torn down after the new park opened in 1991. Sadly, it was built just before Camden Yards opened in the early 1990s, starting the whole retro ballpark movement, and "New Comiskey Park" was ugly, fan unfriendly, and a white elephant almost right after it opened. The first row of seats in the upper deck at what is now called Guaranteed Rate Field are farther away from the field than the last row at Old Comiskey, seen in the photograph on the left around the time it opened in 1910. And no, I DID NOT take that photo. It was printed in the Chicago Tribune yesterday morning in an article about the possible move.
I did, however, take the photograph on the right. Kind of. Back in 1980, the year before I moved from Chicago to Denver, I attended a lot of games at the original Comiskey Park. One Sunday afternoon I was walking down the concourse and looked up to see I was about to run into Harry Caray, the White Sox baseball announcer (along with sidekick Jimmy Piersall). I was able to get a great photo of him, and through the magic of Photoshop later combined it with a photo I took of the old Comiskey Park scoreboard. It was a great place to watch a ballgame, and a very fun summer, but at the end of the year, Bill Veeck, the baseball legend and team owner, was forced to sell the team, for financial reasons, to Jerry Reinsdorf, who immediately declared that "from now on we are going to run a class operation." Veeck, offended by this remark, became a Cubs fan and starting hanging out at Wrigley Field, where he worked on the grounds crew for his father, who was the Cubs team president at the time, when he was young.
Veeck was originally going to sell the team to Eddie DeBartolo, who was going to have Bill run the team, but the other owners, who hated Veeck and his many wacky promotions to get fans in the stands, voted against selling the team to DeBartolo, on the grounds of him being Italian or some such thing. And thus the team went to Reinsdorf, who has owned it to this day, although he also mentioned he might sell the team (we can always hope). It was Bill Veeck who talked Harry Caray into singing "Take me out to the Ballgame" during the 7th inning stretch, a tradition he continued when he became the announcer for the Chicago Cubs and became a national celebrity thanks to the advent of cable and WGN Chicago becoming a "Superstation." I also took the photo on the left of him performing that song sometime during that summer of 1980. Caray sometimes would do "The Twist" (remember that?) to the music being played on the ballpark speakers. I especially remember him twisting to "Run Around Sue," a truly different era from today. I do hope that Reinsdorf sells the team, and the new owner builds a new, fan friendly retro ballpark right across the street from Guaranteed Rate Field, on the spot where Old Comiskey Park used to stand, bless its memory. But in this day and age, I am not going to hold my breath.
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