1919 Chicago White Sox: 3rd highest payroll in AL

[Le Grande Orange]

A new book was just released by SABR entitled, Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox.

One of the interesting things in it is research into the salaries of players of the time. The Baseball Hall of Fame has a collection of cards which contain the basic contract details of players, and these have been used to determine what the actual salaries and payrolls of the American League clubs.

The result to quote from the book:

Now that we have accurate salary information for all players in 1919, it’s hard to make the case that the Chicago White Sox were underpaid. There were many reasons that the eight Black Sox might have agreed to fix the World Series, but it wasn’t because they were
being paid so much less than other major leaguers of equal or lesser talent.

Eliot Asinof, along with many writers before and after him, long insisted that the White Sox had the best talent and the worst payroll. But that claim just doesn’t stand up to modern scrutiny. With few exceptions,
owner Charles Comiskey — long portrayed as a greedy miser and a villain in the Black Sox story — paid salaries that were comparable, and in many cases even favorable, to the rest of the league. The numbers
bear that out.

Below are the 1919 opening day payrolls for the eight AL clubs.

Boston Red Sox: $93,475
New York Yankees: $91,330
Chicago White Sox: $88,461
Detroit Tigers: $81,433
Cleveland Indians: $78,913
St. Louis Browns: $63,000
Washington Senators: $63,000
Philadelphia A’s: $42,000

[joefromchicago]

[excuse the late reply - I just noticed this thread]

Nine guys are sitting around a big table at a blue-collar bar when Bill Gates walks in. He sits down and orders a round for the nine guys. As he's waiting for the drinks, Gates says: "Congratulations! You'll be happy to know that everyone seated at this table is, on average, a billionaire!."

That's the funny thing about mean averages. The 1919 White Sox may have had the third-highest payroll in the AL, but $15,000 of that $88,461 total went to one guy - Eddie Collins - who definitely was paid what he was worth. That salary placed him in the top ranks of all players, but it also represented about 17% of the entire team payroll. That probably put him behind only Ty Cobb,Tris Speaker, and Walter Johnson in the AL in terms of a single player's share of his team's total salary outlay. Ray Schalk probably received around $10,000, so those two together represented over 28% of the entire payroll. Given those numbers, perhaps it's no surprise that Collins and Schalk weren't part of the fix.

I don't think anyone (not even Asinof) has argued that Comiskey couldn't be generous when he wanted to be - or, in the case of Collins, when he really had little choice. That doesn't mean, however, that he didn't nickel-and-dime other players on the Sox. Joe Jackson, arguably the second-best hitter in the AL, was only paid $6,000 in 1919, less than a third of what Detroit paid Cobb. Eddie Cicotte, the team's best pitcher, received only around $9,000, which was $7,000 less than Walter Johnson. That still meant that Cicotte was earning more than the vast majority of pitchers in the AL, but I'm not sure I'd say that he was being paid what he was worth.

In addition, teams were starting to rein in salaries after the Federal League war, so players were resentful not just because they might have been paid less than their peers, but also because they were getting paid less period. To put the 1919 salary figures in perspective, then, we'd need to know more about what the players were getting in 1919 as opposed to what they were getting in, say, 1915. Jackson, for instance, made more in 1913 with the Indians than he did in 1919 with the Sox.

In short, the salary figures alone don't convince me that Comiskey should be absolved of the charge that he was a skinflint when it came to his players.