This biography of Charles "Commy" Comiskey is one of the earliest and most important--and, up to now, one of the hardest for baseball researchers to get their hands on--in the baseball canon. Comiskey spent half a century in the big leagues as a successful player-manager and owner, his clubs winning nine pennants along the way. But the dark cloud that hangs over him is the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which he is inextricably tangled, fair or not. Comiskey's tight-fistedness is often cited as a principal cause of the 1919 World Series scandal. Commy suspected that the fix was on after the White Sox lost the first two games, and even implored his old friend, American League president Ban Johnson, to suspend the Series, but the tide of history could not be dammed.