Chicago White Sox came to SLO to play a minor-league baseball team in 1909 — and lost
San Luis Obispo photographer Frank C. Aston had an uncanny skill at finding enduring images.
Pictures were rarely printed in the newspaper in the early 20th century. Engravings were expensive and made in shops out of town, making them impractical for breaking news pages.
In the era before television, Aston would attend newsworthy events and display the photos he shot there in his front window of his shop. Those images would attract people to his studio and generate a buzz around his portrait business.
Aston photographed some of the earliest airplane flights in San Luis Obispo County.
The weekly San Luis Obispo Tribune used a newfangled electric metaphor in the headline for a story about Aston’s acumen that ran July 14, 1911: “Aston a live wire.”
“Photographer Aston is proving himself a live wire in procuring photographs of interest to the people,” The Tribune reported. “He has recently had some fine views of Pismo Beach on exhibition which he made on the Fourth at the time Wiseman made flights in his biplane. Yesterday Mr. Aston placed on exhibition a large assortment of views which he secured of the wreck of the steamer Santa Rosa at Point Arguello.”
The weekly Tribune wrote on Feb. 24, 1914 that Aston’s “splendid views of this section” had enticed someone to move to town.
The paper called Aston a “well known photographer and booster” for the county.
A collection of images was published in 2001 featuring the work of Frank and Howard Aston ranging from the 1870s to the 1920s.
“San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly in Vintage Postcards” was assembled by Thomas Maxwell-Long, who explained that Aston’s clients included the newly formed Cal Poly and insurance companies.
Frank Aston images show up frequently on social media and in historical collections — depicting a steam engine running by Cal Poly, A threshing crew harvesting grain, a biplane soaring over San Luis Obispo.
Recently, Twitter user Old-Time Baseball Photos shared an Aston photo of the Chicago White Sox playing the Portland Beavers in San Luis Obispo on March 16, 1909.
In the early 1900s, the westernmost Major League Baseball teams were located in Chicago, where the Cubs and White Sox play, and St. Louis, where the Cardinals and Browns were based.
Spring training was less structured in those days. And in this case, the major league team played several minor-league Pacific Coast League teams.
The PCL was the best league in the West and could compete with mid- to low-tier Major League Baseball teams. The PCL developed many famous players over the years, including Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams.
The White Sox would finish in the middle of the pack in 1909 —20 games back from Detroit, lead by Ty Cobb. It would be another decade before the Chicago team would achieve infamy with the rigged 1919 Black Sox World Series scandal.
Cobb lead the Major League that year with a staggering nine home runs. The dead ball era would run for another decade before the emergence of Babe Ruth, smaller ballparks and rules replacing scuffed baseballs with clean ones.
For the White Sox’s 1909 game in San Luis Obispo, the sky was overcast and the Telegram predicted light showers, or “Jupiter Pluvious.”
The stadium was filled to overflowing with some of the 1,200 fans estimated by the Daily Telegram, standing along the baselines. The Telegram noted that ”the automobile parade prior to the game was quite a novelty and attracted a big crowd.”
Based on the photo shared by Old-Time Baseball Photos, the field looks to be located where the Caltrans yard is at the corner of Madonna Road and South Higuera Street.
The Pacific Coast Railway shops, now the Pacific Coast Center, can be seen in the background.
Portland won 6-1, according to the Telegram — or 7-1, according to the photo’s caption.
The White Sox only got four hits, while Portland was fast, smart and better hitting.
Low-scoring games were common then and it only took an hour and 35 minutes to play one. Professional baseball games today average twice as long.
Since the highways of the era were poor, the White Sox were likely traveling by the more comfortable Southern Pacific Railroad. The team had played in Los Angeles the day before and were scheduled to play Oakland the next day so they may have been suffering from train lag.
A few decades later, the Pittsburg Pirates would train in Paso Robles.
This year’s coronavirus outbreak has led to an abbreviated Major League Baseball season, just now underway.
This story was originally published July 25, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
