White Sox don’t have the excuses the Spiders did

But a famed figure for the South Side was partly to blame

Much of the time when writers or announcers refer to the 2024 White Sox steaming toward the worst record in major league history, they include the word “modern,” either with or without quotation marks. That’s because 1901 is considered the start of the modern era of professional baseball, basically because it was the first year the National and American Leagues both existed as recognized “major” leagues (well, the American League just “declared” itself major). and soon after the two leagues struck the National Agreement, began working together in a coordinated fashion, and met in a World Series to determine league supremacy.

A major (league) reason is that before 1901, professional baseball was a realm of lawlessness that would have made the Wild West cringe. And that’s not just because fights broke out all the time among players, umps and fans — real fights, not the pushy-shovey modern variety. One even lit the stands in Boston on fire in 1894, setting off a blaze that impacted more than 100 buildings.

Players came and went as they pleased. Teams came and went, jumping leagues back and forth. Whole leagues came into being and then disappeared. The National League had been around for decades and even tried to exercise a reserve clause of sorts, but a reserve clause doesn’t mean much when other wildcat leagues are happy to lure your players away.

There were other leagues with delusions of being the majors, too, like the Western League, with several teams in major cities that competed with the National. The American Association was a major league for a decade at the end of the 19th Century, in part or mostly because their teams were will to serve beer at games. Even the Western-turned-American League was not regarded as “major” in its first season (1900).

But it was internal problems in the National League that led to the debacle of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders and their 134-loss season.

And, of course, the White Sox were a major part of the problem, even though they didn’t exist (well, the Chicago White Stockings were in the league, but they became the Cubs and all the white socks then made the transfer to the new American League in 1901, but that’s another story). OK, it wasn’t the White Sox themselves who created the fiasco, but the person more associated with White Sox history than anyone — Charles Comiskey.

Huh?

Charles Comiskey was born in Chicago in 1859, but ended up starting his baseball career with the St. Louis Browns in 1882. For the rest of the century, he was a player then player/manager then sometimes player/manager/owner for various teams in the Western League and American Association, most notably the St. Paul Saints. By the time 1899 rolled around, Comiskey was a well-known figure in the sport, and bent on owning a major-market team.

Which brings us to the Spiders, and not the ones on MIss Muffet’s tuffet.

The Spiders were very successful for most of their existence, including seven consecutive winning seasons from 1892-98, including two second-place finishes in the 12-team National League and a victory in a playoff matchup that was an early days World Series equivalent.

Then, owners Frank and Stanley Robison got greedy.

Part of the wild-westdom before 1901 is that there were no restrictions on anyone owning more than one team — which, of course, was sort of like allowing the same people to control the Red Sox and Yankees, an obvious conflict of interest to anyone but the owners themselves. In 1898, the St. Louis ballpark was destroyed by fire and the Browns subsequently went bankrupt. The Robisons, obviously believers that no tragedy should go to waste, decided to try to make a move to the then-much larger St. Louis market.

But what about Charles Comiskey?

Hold on, we’re getting there.

According to Turning the Black Sox White, a terribly-written but thoroughly-researched Comiskey biography by Tim Hornbaker, when the Robisons went to St. Louis to bid at the public auction of the Browns, the main competitor was supposed to be a group headed by Comiskey and Tom Loftus. For reasons mysterious, the Comiskey group made no bid. There was speculation they were sandbagging and would buy the team from the highest bidders, but that was just a rumor — yet more mystery.

Thus, the Robisons came to own both the Spiders and the Browns, a team in St. Louis that was a bigger market than Cleveland. Guess what they did.

No, they didn’t!!

Yes, they did.

Seeing the big bucks in the big market, the Robisons completely gutted their small-market team, taking manager Patsy Tebeau, three future Hall-of-Famers (including a pitcher you may have heard of named Cy Young), and every other Spider who could hit, catch, or throw to St. Louis and leaving Cleveland with the dregs.

See — in ancient times, with no real rules to stop them, there was once an ownership even worse than Jerry Reinsdorf. Not much worse, but a little bit.

Naturally, the fans in Cleveland weren’t happy, and bobble-head and jersey giveaways not having been invented yet, they found other ways to spend a quarter and left the stadium empty enough to make the GuRF look crowded these days. Attendance was sometimes in the dozens, never out of the hundreds.

The visiting team share of the gates wasn’t enough to cover travel and hotels, so eventually they did what capitalism demanded — they refused to play in Cleveland. Thus the Spiders not only had no major league-level players left, but they had to play all but eight of their final 93 games of 1899 on the road.

Yeesh, those Spiders really did have solid excuses.

They sure did. And so did the pre-draft, pre-free agency expansion New York Mets, whose 120-loss record has just been matched by the 2024 White Sox and is sure to fall this week.

So, our 2024 White Sox? No good excuse at all. Unless, of course, you include being controlled by Jerry Reinsdorf, Which, come to think of it, is a pretty darned good excuse indeed.