Regrets

As a writer, James T. Farrell understood the South Side of Chicago and baseball, which at one time were more or less synonymous.  Last night, I was reading The Face of Time, one of Farrell’s many autobiographical novels.  The main character is a poor six-year old boy who has been shipped off to live with his lace-curtain relatives, just as Farrell was.  In the book, Danny O’Neill’s older brother and father have stopped by to pick him up for an outing.  “Pa and I came to take you to the ball game,” says Billy O’Neill.  “The White Sox are playing in their new ball park, the New Comiskey Park.”  So, we’re talking the inaugural season of 1910 here.

I grew up thinking the White Sox would always call Comiskey Park home.  As a nine-year old, I’d never seen a place so beautiful.  It had brick walls out front topped by a series of broad, beautiful arches that framed the golf-course sized outfield; heaven for a pitcher was the mound at 35^th and Shields.  Joe Louis won his heavyweight crown at Comiskey Park, and Larry Doby broke the color line there for the American League, but that was before my time, which dates to June 15, 1962.  The Sox beat the Angels, 7-6.  Too bad baseball considers obstructed sightlines a crime worse than gambling or steroids.  The wrecking ball is not subject to appeal. 

Comiskey Park was the place I very much wanted to take my daughter for her first baseball game, just as my father had taken me and James T. Farrell’s real or imagined father had taken him.