Chicago White Sox

The Chicago White Sox have an interesting origin story that I found appropriate to lok ino after our friend Joe Ziemba has talked so fondly of his favorite team that he grew up near, including his story in this edition of the great Nellie Fox.

The White Sox story begins in Sioux City, Iowa of all places back in 1893 according to MLB.com history on the team. Their nickname was the Cornhuskers in that location and they were founded as a minor league team. Near the end of the inagural season a substantial person in hard ball history purchased the squad, a man named Charles Comiskey.

The new owner moved the franchise from Iowa to St. Paul Minneoosta and they became known as the Saints in those parts as part of the Western League. When the Western League merged to help create the new American League in 1900, the Saints moved to Chicago. The predecessor of today's Chicago Cubs were already playing in the Windy City on the North Side and had a pretty large following. Being the marketing genious that he was, Comiskey tried to associate himself with the senior circuit team in every way that he could to bring fandom to his own club. After he was told that they could not have the word "Chicago" stitched across the front s of their uniforms, Charles did the next best thing, he re-named the Saints to the moniker that the present day Cubs had used to be called and abandoned, the White Stockings.

Remember in our post on the baseball uniforms of the 19th century when we discussed an experiment in 1882 when the players of certain positions wear specially colored uniforms to denote their playing position, and the era was clled the Clown Costmumes?" Well the long highly worn socks or stockings were the only way anyone could denote which team the players were on. Each team was denoted by a certain color of stockings that they wore for identity purposes. The Chicago team wore white so hencethey were often called the White Sox. Since we already stated that the modern day Sox were not started until eleven years later in 1893, these white stockinged players in the 1880s eventually became the Cubs of the National League.

The marketing ploy worked as there were plenty of fans that still related to the 1880's team name and they were imediately drawn nostalgically to the South Siders. The shorteneing of the Stockings to a simple Sox was crditted to the ingenuity of newspapermen in the early 20th-Century in an effort to get the teams name in the headlines. Remember in headlines space is limited and every letter counts!

Part of the deal for the Amercian League to start playing in Chicago agreed to by James Hart, president of the Chicago National League ballclub was that the former Saints team could only play South of 35th Street.

The new White Sox played their first game as Chicago in Champaign, Illinois as the knocked of the University of Illinois 10-9. That same season on April 21, 1900, the Sox played their first game at a small field at 39th and Princeton. The current ballpark is located at 35th and Shields. They won their first game on April 22, 1900, with a 5-3 victory over the Brewers, and on Oct. 14, 1906, the White Sox won the lone all-Chicago World Series with an 8-3 victory over the Cubs in Game 6 per the MLB.com account.

The site of the MLB also has the history of the logos and uniforms of the White Sox.

The photograph in the banner above is courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons collection of public Domain pictures. It is of the 1916 Chicago White Sox Team Panoramic Photograph. Mount is embossed with the details: "Delegates to the Fourteenth Annual Convention of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association enjoying the National game at the White Sox Baseball Park, Chicago, Ill., Wednesday, August Ninth, Nineteen Hundred and Sixteen." The photo is unattributed to any particular person that took it.

Special thanks to Baseball-Reference.com, Stathead.com and the most wonderful book by Larry Lester and Wayne Stivers, The Negro Leagues Book, Volume 2.