Who doesn’t want to be part of a momentous season — a good one or the worst one?
I went to Guaranteed Rate Field Sunday to watch the Chicago White Sox, who at the time had just 34 wins. To put that into context, the New York Yankees (who secured a ticket to the postseason Wednesday) already had about that many wins back in mid-May when they played the Sox.
When you go to a #whitesox game, you have to visit @played41.
We love you, Nancy Faust! pic.twitter.com/iW1kyC9tY3
— Kori Rumore Finley (@rumormill) September 15, 2024
I expected to see a dismal performance, but a funny thing happened on the White Sox’s way to infamy — they won. It was the team’s second consecutive win and halfway to matching their longest win streak of the season. Instead of strikeouts, I was rewarded with home runs, fireworks and the iconic rotating pinwheels atop the center field scoreboard. It was the second game of the Sox’s first three-game winning streak since late June.
Yes, the 2024 White Sox could still be known as one of the worst teams in Major League Baseball since 1900. But instead of shame, I felt a spark on Sunday. It must have been a tiny glimpse at what South Side fans experienced during the Go-Go White Sox season of 1959.
April 5, 1959: ‘With a little bit of luck, the White Sox can take it all this year!’
Tribune sportswriter Richard Dozer predicted Chicago “really has a chance to separate the New York Yankees from the American League pennant they have won nine times in the last decade” Many might have reasonably questioned his judgment. Nevertheless, Dozer cited the Sox youth and the fact that the aging Yankees appeared “to be running out of supermen.”
But Dozer, who had covered the team for four seasons, believed the “face lifted” Detroit Tigers could also contend for a championship.
April 10, 1959: ‘Merciful conclusion to a long, cold afternoon’
The Sox season opener in Detroit on April 10 was an indication of a season that saw few easy wins. It took Nellie Fox’s first home run in more than a year for the Sox to finally win in the 14th inning — ending the 4-hour, 25-minute game in 30-degree weather.
The Sox started the season 4-0 — sweeping the Tigers — and battled the Cleveland Indians through the first half of the season for first place.
July 28, 1959: Home run puts White Sox on top
When the Sox took possession of first once again — this time for good — it was another telling game. After Al Smith’s two-run homer in the eighth, the Sox overcame a rare Luis Aparicio error at short in the ninth, and Billy Pierce threw a strike to give him a complete-game 4-3 win over the Yankees. Almost 44,000 fans — the largest crowd in almost two years — “stood up as one” to cheer the home team “when Willie Veeck’s crew started to light the blockbusters, now the traditional booming farewell to the Comiskey Park clients,” the Tribune reported.
It was the 24th one-run victory for the South Siders, who were affectionately, if exasperatedly, called the Runless Wonders. Of their 94 wins that year, 35 were won by the minimum, and they lost 15 games by the same margin.
Aug. 25, 1959: Kluszewski arrives
The Sox pulled away from the Indians in August, and new owner Bill Veeck and manager Al Lopez traded for slugger Ted “Big Klu” Kluszewski, one-time National League home run “terror,” for the pennant push.
“The husky former Indiana University football player was the National League’s All-Star first baseman in 1954, 1955 and 1956,” the Tribune reported.
Sept. 22, 1959: ‘Double play! Sox are American League champions!’
Fittingly, the Go-Go Sox clinched the pennant in Cleveland against the Indians — a team they owned all season, beating them 15 times — and with plenty of dramatics. The first White Sox pennant since 1919 (yes, that team) came “with the bases filled with Cleveland Indians, only one out, and the White Sox in danger of losing a two-run lead,” the Tribune reported Sept. 23. Lopez brought in Gerry Staley to stem the bleeding.
The Tribune’s Edward Prell provided the historic play-by-play in the next morning’s edition: “Staley pitched one ball — a sinker low and outside. Vic Power swung and Luis Aparicio glided to his left, spearing the ball. For a split second, it seemed he thought of making the toss to Nellie Fox. But he flashed three or four steps, hit the base with his spikes, and rifled the ball to Ted Kluszewski at first base.”
Also on Sept. 22, 1959: The drama wasn’t over
Back in Chicago, at 10:30 p.m., the air raid sirens jumped to life. For five minutes, they screamed, blaring the terrifying warning of incoming Soviet bombers. In the middle of the Cold War, that’s what many residents thought. Just a few months earlier, the Tribune reported how a mock 10-megaton hydrogen bomb had “killed” 229,625 and “injured” 622,284 and “spread a vast cloud of deadly radiation fallout.” Such annihilation was a very real fear.
Thousands of residents poured into the streets, looking to the sky and asking neighbors if it was real. One woman woke up her three children and hurried them to the basement, the Tribune reported. A man said he locked himself in a closet with a bottle of beer. Another man jumped in his car and raced to Wisconsin.
Of course, many residents — especially Sox fans watching the game on WGN-TV — immediately understood that the sirens were part of the celebration, an official recognition of the Sox ending a four-decade drought.
But exuberant, altruistic reasons didn’t mollify many angry residents. Bell Telephone switchboards and the Tribune newsroom were flooded with calls from confused and scared residents who turned angry when told yes, the Sox had won, and no, the end of the world wasn’t nigh.
The anger didn’t abate the next day. The Tribune reported City Hall received calls at a rate of 1,100 an hour to protest the sirens. Mayor Richard J. Daley showed off his Sox allegiance when he explained the sirens were sounded “in the hilarity and exuberance of the evening. I regret if anyone was inconvenienced, but after 40 years of waiting for a pennant in the American League, I assume that everyone who was watching the telecast was happy about the White Sox victory.”
Fire Commissioner Robert Quinn, who was also acting defense corps director, took full responsibility. “This was intended as just a tribute to a great little team,” he said.
Robert Woodward, the state’s civil defense director, said the siren’s misuse was “shocking” and called for an official investigation.
That sentiment was echoed by angry letter writers to the Tribune who asked which “nincompoop” was responsible and demanded “anyone so stupid as to sound the air raid alarm simply to celebrate a baseball victory should immediately be removed from his post.”
Woodward got his investigation but in November the U.S. attorney said no federal statute had been violated.
Sept. 23, 1959: 25,000 people jam the airport to greet the team
Back to the Sox. They flew into Midway Airport at about 2 a.m. Wednesday to find a huge, raucous crowd, not knowing they were wading into an odd mix of joy and anger. The roar of the crowd reportedly drowned out the sound of landing airplanes. “The din lasted into the break of dawn and appeared to have enough steam to last until the opening of the World Series,” the Tribune reported.
Sept. 24, 1959: City fetes Sox on LaSalle Street
The team paraded down State Street, which was “packed from curbs to store fronts with fans, wildly cheering.” Thousands more jammed windows and showered the parade route with ticker tape and confetti. The festivities were led, of course, by Daley, “self-styled No. 1 Sox fan, along with Chuck Comiskey and Veeck.”
The team finished the season, taking two of three from Detroit.
Oct. 1, 1959: One down — three to go
Sox won the first game of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Oct. 8, 1959: Go-Go Sox ran out of gas
In retrospect, it’s good that Chicago celebrated the pennant with such unabashed joy and vigor. Of the World Series against the Dodgers, just in their second year in Los Angeles, the less said the better. The Sox lost in six games.
The 1959 Sox would send three players to the Hall of Fame (Wynn, Fox and Aparicio; four if you count Larry Doby, who saw limited playing time), plus manager Lopez and owner Veeck.
More importantly, possibly, the Go-Go Sox live on in Chicago baseball fans’ hearts and memories, and as an integral part in one of the loudest scandals in city history.
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