Didnt know much about Lyons .. so I looked him up. I found this info from his SABR bio. Didnt realize how little I knew about the White Sox, either. Specifically. I didnt realize how much suffering the White Sox fans went through during their Middle Period (as philliesfiend has defined it):
The Chicago franchise, once the strongest in the American League, was a wreck. The club had been mediocre-to-awful since the Black Sox were banned in 1920, achieving a winning record only seven times in twenty-six years. Every other AL team—even the St. Louis Browns—had won a pennant during that time. Founder Charles A. Comiskey had died in 1931 and his son and heir, Louis, died eight years later. That left the franchise in the hands of Louis’s widow, Grace Comiskey, and her bankers and lawyers. Mrs. Comiskey held most of the stock in trust for her three children and delegated most decisions to the vice president and general manager, Leslie O’Connor, whose only baseball pedigree was his service as Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s secretary.
The roster was heavy with thirty-something journeymen; the only star, Luke Appling, was forty. The Sox edged up to sixth place in 1947, though they lost four more games than the year before. That winter they traded Lopat, their best pitcher, to the Yankees for three more journeymen. In 1948 they sank to the cellar, losing 101 times.
The sole male heir to the Comiskey heritage, twenty-two-year-old Charles A. Comiskey II, claimed his birthright and replaced O’Connor as vice president in 1948.
http://sabr.org/node/17746
Originally Posted by
ian2813
Well, I didn't just get it off the top of my head. I thought through several different teams and different possibilities before Lyons came to mind.
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