An Irishman's Diary

One of the great festivals of the American secular calendar has rolled around again - the World Series.

One of the great festivals of the American secular calendar has rolled around again - the World Series.

What with Katrina and Rita (and Wilma standing by), the series this year brings with it a much-needed air of "business as usual" - though in terms of results, business has been far from usual in recent years. Upstart teams from Arizona and Florida have beaten the supposedly all-powerful New York Yankees, and last year the Boston Red Sox won the series for the first time since 1918.

That Red Sox win lifted at last "the curse of the Bambino", inflicted on the club for trading the legendary Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. And this year too, redemption is possible. One of the finalists in the Series is the Chicago White Sox; here in Chicago tonight, they play the first of their best-of-seven Series games against the Houston Astros.

The Sox haven't been world champs since 1917, and became known to history as the Black Sox when, in the 1919 Series, eight of the heavily favoured team allegedly took money from gamblers to lose.

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Some say team owner Charlie Comiskey had nobody to blame but himself for this scandal. Comiskey was born in Chicago in 1859, the son of an Irish immigrant father, and thus, according to the custom of the country, classified as "Irish". He cut his ball-playing teeth with the Dubuque Rabbits, and had a successful career as player and manager before landing the Chicago franchise of the newly-formed American League in 1901.

The White Sox are the team of Chicago's black, immigrant, blue-collar South Side. Their home field is on the southern fringe of the Bridgeport neighbourhood, a part of the city to which Irish labourers fresh from digging the Erie Canal came to dig the Illinois and Michigan. Here, in 1910, Comiskey built what he called "The Baseball Palace of the World", with its green cornerstone laid on St Patricks Day and showers in the stands to cool fans down on sweltering Chicago summer afternoons.

The first time The Star-Spangled Banner was sung at a baseball game was in Comiskey Park; the first All-Star game was played there in 1933; later on, an organ was installed and a woman called Nancy Faust played it. And when in 1991 the park was torn down the infield dirt - meaning soil - was brought to the new park just across South 35th Street.

Public-spirited Comiskey allowed his palace to be used free of charge for worthy causes, saying, "The fans built it, didn't they?"

If he had dealt with his players as open-handedly there might not have been a Black Sox scandal. Instead, he treated them like dirt - literally: he refused to have their uniforms washed regularly to save on laundry bills. Stars and journeymen alike were paid below the going rate. He went back on his word about raises and bonuses. And back then, of course, instead of free agency there was the "reserve clause" - meaning the owner had every right and the player none, other than to take it or leave it. It is a measure of how deep the players' bitterness was that they evidently were prepared to play instead for the New York gangster Arnold Rothstein (the original of Gatsby's buddy Meyer Wolfsheim in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby).

At the height of the following season the eight players were indicted and, though there were no prosecutions, the commissioner of baseball, who happened to be a new broom by the name of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight for life.

Comiskey died in 1931 and so was spared most of the 40 years in the wilderness which the Sox subsequently endured. When they did return to the World Series in 1959, no Comiskeys were in charge. The team was then owned by Bill Veeck, a showman very much Charlie's opposite, author of an autobiography entitled Veeck as in Wreck, tireless promoter of his "Go, Go Sox" - a hit of the same name, by Captain Stubbie and the Buccaneers, is currently enjoying a revival - and inventor of the "exploding scoreboard", with fireworks shooting out of the scoreboard whenever the Sox score.

Not to be outdone, Mayor Richard Daley congratulated the 1959 team by ordering the city's air-raid sirens to be sounded, which led many to believe the Russians had landed.

Although Comiskey Park is now US Cellular Field, the exploding scoreboard and the organ are still there. Bridgeport appetites are still catered to with great-tasting Polish sausage which lies where it lands like a length of lead pipe. And over the past five years the White Sox have been pretty decent, without seriously threatening to take all the marbles.

There are signs that this could be the year, though. Already in the play-offs they have had stupendous pitching and equally astonishing luck. Ozzie Guillen, the manager, is a former Sox star, who talks a mile a minute and gives nothing away, reducing the media to playing up his broken English and the fluency of his effing. He is from Venezuela, the first Latino to manage a World Series team. His story is one that most Americans still prefer to believe in. Nobody buys Fitzgerald's line that there are no second acts in American life. And second acts don't have to be disasters.