by Bud Selig
And believe me, it didn’t. Bartholomay was steaming ahead with his plans to move the Braves, and his board of directors voted 12–6 to move to Atlanta. The New York Times had written in July that this was their plan, and it was happening.
Atlanta Stadium was being completed, and the Braves planned to play there in 1965. We worked behind the scenes as Milwaukee County and the state of Wisconsin tried to stop the team from moving.
Suing a major league team—and, in effect, the National League—was a bold thing to do, especially for a city that wanted to get another team if we lost the Braves. We worried that we were going to alienate people and that the suit could boomerang back on us, making what was happening even worse. But the only other option was to watch our team leave, and that wasn’t an option we could get behind.
We used our local law firm, Foley & Lardner, and brought in a Washington law firm because we had decided to attack it as an antitrust case. This sounds a little crazy now, but I really thought we had a good case, that what the Braves were doing wasn’t just wrong but illegal. I wouldn’t say I got cocky, but I definitely thought they might crack because they didn’t want to get sued. I thought we could win if it did go to court, and we almost did.
In the end, we did win an injunction that delayed the Braves from moving by one season. The case had been heard by Elmer W. Roller, who ruled in our favor. I enjoyed the ruling immensely.
I got to know Bowie Kuhn, an outside counsel who was representing the National League. He would go on to become baseball’s fifth commissioner, replacing Spike Eckert in 1969, and served sixteen seasons. We got along well even though we were on different sides of this case.
Bowie always called Judge Roller a “hometown judge.” I would encounter plenty of those myself in later years, but for now I was fully on board with Judge Roller’s wisdom. The NL appealed the ruling and won a split decision, by a 4–3 vote, in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The judges on that panel were actually very sympathetic to the Brewers, but they just didn’t think state antitrust laws were applicable in this situation.
By then it was clear the Braves were going to play at County Stadium for one more season and that would be it. They would be in Atlanta in 1966 and forever more, no matter how much it hurt me and the Milwaukee community.
That was the weirdest year ever. It’s safe to say that a franchise with one foot out the door isn’t going to get much support. The Braves muddled through an 86–76 season under manager Bobby Bragan, getting the usual excellence from Aaron, Mathews, and the Torre I had babysat when he was Frank’s little brother. They were fifth in the standings and last in attendance, drawing 555,584 dispirited fans.
The Braves front office was gearing up the operations in Atlanta and barely paid attention to what was going on in Milwaukee. There was so much bitterness here that the team’s staffers didn’t even want to stick around to run the club.
One of the strangest sidelights is they offered our group—Teams Inc.—a chance to essentially run the operation during that final year in Milwaukee. They paid us a nickel per ticket sold—a whopping $27,779.20 for a full season of involvement. We weren’t doing it for the money, of course. It was great experience that would benefit us if we could ever land another team.
For some reason I believed we would, but there wasn’t an abundance of positive thinking in the community. Even my father echoed the skepticism.
“Buddy, it’s Milwaukee,” he told me. “People say we can’t support a major league team. You’re wasting your time.”
6
BRINGING BASEBALL BACK to Milwaukee became my life. As the one fully committed staffer for Teams Inc., I changed our name to Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club. I’ll admit that move didn’t get banner headlines in the Milwaukee Journal. We were a company without a baseball team, major or minor league. But for me it was a method of making something happen, of moving the chains, which, as a lifelong Packers fan, I’ve always understood.
I chose Brewers as the name because it was the name of the minor league team my mom and I watched so often when I was a boy, the team that played at Borchert Field. I figured it would make people smile when they remembered life before the Braves, who, in complete hindsight, exploited our city and robbed any future efforts of the goodwill of baseball fans.
I understood what fans were feeling because I was one of them. But I had my foot in the door and became something of a squatter at County Stadium. I used County Stadium as the mailing address for the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club, which kept me from mixing my baseball business with my work for my father or life at home with Donna and the kids. The Braves’ comptroller had abandoned his office, moving his work to Atlanta, and I moved in. It would be my home away from home until 1998, when I was named baseball’s ninth commissioner.
If the MBBC was going to be viable, we had to raise money to secure a team whenever one became available, either through relocation of an existing franchise or expansion. Bob Uihlein, Dick Cutler, and others involved in the effort drew up a list of prospects in the Milwaukee business community we could tap for the money that would help Milwaukee get a second chance at major league baseball. I drove from place to place visiting these Wisconsin business leaders in person to sell them on the significance of Milwaukee having a team in the majors. One by one I landed the pitches, gaining serious financial commitments from individuals and companies until we had an impressive group with deep financial roots to get baseball to take us seriously.
But even with this group, it was hard trying to envision baseball’s future in the city, just as it was heading out the door. Sandy Koufax pitched against the Braves in their last home game here in the fall of ’65. We have a photo of Aaron and Mathews walking from the dugout to the clubhouse for the last time. It was so sad.
Once the Braves were gone and County Stadium was eerily quiet, I knew we had to do something to keep Milwaukee in the conversation around major league baseball. Because the city’s lawsuit against the team was still ongoing after the ’65 season ended, it gave me the tiniest bit of standing to attend baseball’s off-season meetings. I went, but I can report that I was treated like I had leprosy. Most of the old-line owners looked at me with contempt, and even the nice guys seemed to feel sorry for those of us from Milwaukee, and that wasn’t what we wanted from them. We wanted to be taken seriously.
We’d work the lobby and I’d introduce myself to everybody who came by. I hit it off with the Baltimore delegation better than any of the others. At the winter meetings in 1965, we traveled to Miami to make a presentation about Milwaukee’s situation and desire to get baseball back at County Stadium, where we had set attendance records.
I don’t know what showing up for meetings like that turned out to mean, other than that we showed that we weren’t going away. I would continue to deliver that message over the phone, talking to anyone who would listen, but I can understand how my dad thought I was wasting my time. We weren’t getting anywhere.
I was in my car the night the Braves had their opener in 1966. They were playing the Pirates, and I had a good signal from KDKA radio in Pittsburgh, listening to legendary announcer Bob Prince. He said, “Welcome to Atlanta, Georgia. We’re a long way from Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” just pushing the dagger in deeper.
Meanwhile, Packer fever had swept Wisconsin. Vince Lombardi had built a football machine in Green Bay, and it seemed to be all anybody talked about in Milwaukee. Fans here were mad at baseball and in love with Pete Rozelle’s NFL, especially the Packers. I knew I had to do something to get baseball back into the minds of my neighbors as well as Spike Eckert and the owners who controlled the major leagues. My idea was to stage an exhibition game and draw a bigger crowd to County Stadium than teams like the Braves were getting at their games.
It probably wouldn’t have been too tough to get teams to play here in March, on their way to their home stadiums from spring training. But you are delusional if you count on good weather in Milwaukee in March, and I wasn’t delusional. I knew I ne
eded to get a game during the summer, and that would be tougher.
After studying schedules, I saw that the White Sox and Twins shared an off day on Monday, July 24. I circled that on my desk blotter calendar and headed off to Florida during spring training. I billed it as a way to take ten-year-old Sari and seven-year-old Wendy to the beach, but of course that was really subterfuge for the trip’s true mission.
I knew that Rudie Schaffer, a Wisconsin native who had worked for the Triple-A Brewers, was one of the White Sox’ marketing guys. Rudie told me the only way he could consider a game was if the White Sox were guaranteed money. “What if it was a hundred thousand dollars?” I asked him, pulling a figure off the top of my head.
Schaffer arranged a meeting with Arthur Allyn, the owner of the White Sox, and he was interested if I could get another team. This started a nice relationship with Art.
Calvin Griffith from the Twins, on the other hand, wasn’t interested. He told me he felt badly about what had happened in Milwaukee but that his team didn’t do exhibition games in midseason. Then I told him I could pay him a hundred thousand dollars. I thought he was going to kiss me.
My partners were surprised I’d given the teams a two-hundred-thousand-dollar commitment, but it would turn out to be a wise investment. We put tickets on sale about six weeks before the game, hiring three former Braves employees to staff the windows and handle the tickets. I got myself on radio and television as much as I could, but a week before the game we had sold only about ten thousand tickets. I was stopping off at the box office twice a day, morning and night, and one of the women I’d hired told me we were starting to do a little better. On the Thursday before the game we’d hit twenty-five thousand, and there were lines at the stadium to buy tickets. I was thrilled.
The lines continued over the weekend, with the staff busier than hell. By the end of the afternoon on Saturday we had an unexpected problem. We didn’t have any good seats left. My supervisor asked how long we were going to stay open. I could hear my father in my ear, quoting Harry Gordon Selfridge’s line about the customer always being right.
“Until every customer is taken care of,” I said.
I wound up calling the commissioner’s office for permission to add standing-room-only spots in a roped-off area around the warning track. I was told it was okay with the league if the teams approved it, and after I gave them an extra five thousand dollars they were enthusiastic supporters of the idea.
We sold 6,250 standing-room tickets for the outfield, and wound up drawing 51,144 fans on a beautiful night. It was serendipitous how everything worked out. There are turning points in everyone’s life, everyone’s career, and this was one of mine.
If I’d overestimated the support we could receive, if the anger toward major league baseball kept fans away, it could have been devastatingly bad for me. I could have had one of the shortest careers ever in baseball—over before it really started—but in the end that one night would be a real launching pad.
We had done it. I had done it. And the timing, it turned out, was key.
The summer of 1967 was painful across America because there were ugly race riots in many cities. Milwaukee wasn’t spared. Protests broke out over police brutality and housing discrimination less than a week after crowds packed County Stadium. A fight between teenagers turned into a riot on July 30 and grew so bad that the city instituted a round-the-clock curfew for July 31.
I watched in horror, ashamed at the conditions that angered African Americans and disappointed with the behavior on both sides of the riot. But timing always plays a role in success, and it did for me, as we had made our statement about Milwaukee baseball a week before the front page was dominated by events of much more consequence.
We had momentum and it was time to ride it.
The White Sox had a very good pitching staff in ’67—the rotation had Gary Peters, Joel Horlen, and a young Tommy John, and the bullpen included knuckleballer Wilbur Wood and my old friend Don McMahon—but there were no stars in the lineup. Chicago fans were starting to fall in love with Leo Durocher’s Cubs, at the expense of the Sox. They hadn’t drawn a million fans since ’65 and attendance seemed likely to continue to decline, so Art Allyn was ripe for my pitch.
I persuaded him to have the White Sox play nine home games in Milwaukee, one against each AL opponent. I was excited to be able to pull this off and sought to promote the games on the County Stadium scoreboard when the Packers played games there against the Falcons, Vikings, and Browns.
One day at County Stadium, eating lunch with Ockie Krueger, whom Lombardi had put in charge of the Milwaukee operation, I asked if it would be possible to advertise our White Sox games on the board. I wanted to put the phone number for tickets up there—933-8650, weird but I still remember it—and asked Ockie what he thought. He said you got to talk to the coach.
I inquired about Lombardi’s schedule for the game that weekend. “He’ll be here Friday, ten o’clock,” Ockie said. “But if I was you I’d be here at nine thirty. Vince works on army time.” I was there at nine. My phone rang about nine twenty. Ockie said, “Coach is here and he’ll see you.”
Well, Coach Lombardi couldn’t have been nicer. We talked about baseball, all the games he saw at the Polo Grounds. He was really a good baseball fan. He congratulated me for getting the White Sox. I told him what I needed and he said to Ockie Krueger, “What do we have?” “Not much,” Ockie told him.
“Bud, we’ll help you any way we can,” Lombardi said. “We’ll put it up on the board.”
I’ll never forget that game.
It was Rams versus Packers to advance to the NFL championship game. The sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal was a guy named Ollie Kuechle, and I don’t know why but he hated baseball, hated the Braves, hated everything, really. He was nasty. He saw our ads on the scoreboard and he went nuts. “What’s all that Brewer crap on the scoreboard?” He got in this fight with other Packers people in the press box. “Baseball! Who cares about that game? Nobody cares about it.”
Robert Cannon, a Milwaukee judge who was serving as a legal adviser to the Players Association and had close ties to the Packers, came and got me, told me about the ugly scene in the press box about our ads. Now it was after the game and the Packers won big. I was still at the stadium well after the game, in the little hospitality area we had, and up came Vince. I told him congratulations and walked away. Later I got up my courage and went over to apologize about the stupidity in the press box. He knew everything about it before I told him. He thought it was funny.
“Young man, there’s only one person who runs the Green Bay Packers, and it’s me,” he said. “I don’t care about Ollie Kuechle. I don’t care about anybody else. I wish you well. I have one condition. I love Mantle. Will you invite me when Mantle comes with the Yankees?”
You bet I would.
The Packers were a true dynasty in that era, rolling toward another championship. I was in a better mood that winter than I had been a year before, and was excited as any fan when Lombardi’s team landed a rematch with the Cowboys in the championship game. They had beaten Don Meredith, Bob Hayes, and Chuck Howley at the Cotton Bowl by 34–27 the year before, and the rematch was scheduled at Lambeau Field on New Year’s Eve. We’d gotten good tickets, near the forty-yard line or so. It was an unbelievable day.
We had driven up the night before and checked into a hotel. I got up in the morning and it was sunny, a beautiful day. One of my friends said it was really cold out. I said, “Oh, it looks like a gorgeous day.” After all, it had been nice the day before. At least I’d thought it was nice the day before. The high was twenty-one, but we had some sun and it wasn’t too windy. Not bad by our standards.
On the drive to the game, we had the radio on and a report came in that it was already sixteen below zero at Lambeau Field, with the wind chill more than fifty below. That gets your attention, even when you’ve spent your whole life in Milwaukee.
What an experience that day was. It was a h
elluva game. We were there all the way to the end, when Jerry Kramer threw that block that allowed Bart Starr to get into the end zone. I know everybody from Dallas thinks that was a game they should have won, but the 21–17 victory was a classic Packer win. It was such a battle of wills, from the start until Kramer’s historic block.
Once the celebration ended at the stadium, I got back to our Green Bay hotel, turned the water on as hot as I could get it, and climbed into the bath. I didn’t feel anything. I was worried about frostbite after the game, but at the time I was so cold I didn’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t dressed warm enough, but neither was anyone else. You couldn’t dress warm enough, but we never once considered going someplace warmer. That would have been deserting the team, and I’m not a deserter, not a quitter.
We drew well when the White Sox played in Milwaukee—23,510 for the first game against the Angels but more and more as the summer arrived, including two games above forty thousand. County Stadium was rocking. But I was distracted all summer because there were whispers about a likelihood of expansion under embattled commissioner Spike Eckert, who was in trouble because the NFL’s popularity was soaring and baseball was beginning to be viewed as staid, with scoring and attendance down.
Charlie Finley had moved the A’s from Kansas City to Oakland, which had brought on the wrath of powerful Missouri senator Stuart Symington. His threats to call hearings on baseball’s antitrust exemption led to expansion in the American League, which seemingly happened overnight. Art Allyn told me it was coming when I saw him in Milwaukee for a White Sox game, and shortly thereafter came word that Kansas City and Seattle were getting teams. I was disappointed but I wasn’t shocked.
The upside to two new teams in the AL was that the NL might follow suit and add teams. That became my latest obsession. I started working National League owners as hard I could, reminding them we’d had over fifty thousand at a game here the previous summer and telling them how well the White Sox games were being supported.
