by Bud Selig
I hit the road to meet with owners when they would take meetings, bringing with me any prominent resident of Milwaukee who happened to have a relationship with that owner. I was pulling out all the stops because there was no time to waste. The NL moved almost as fast as the AL, calling a meeting for May 27 at the Executive House hotel in Chicago, on Wacker, near the river.
I went there hopeful of bringing home a team. Cubs owner Phil Wrigley and the Cardinals’ Gussie Busch were in our camp, expected to campaign for us with their fellow owners once the boardroom doors closed.
The meeting dragged on and on, and the longer it went, the more hopeful I got. Finally, the owners left the room and Walter O’Malley came into a side room to make an announcement. “The winners are,” he began.
His lips were forming the letter “M,” and to me this was happening in slow motion. It was a surreal moment I’ve never forgotten. I was thinking, My God, we’ve got it. But when time started to move again he was saying “Montreal.” Then “San Diego.” My heart dropped.
This was crushing. I was devastated that we got so close but couldn’t get across the finish line. I really thought we were getting a team that day in Chicago. I was really optimistic.
Later I was told that it was the Atlanta Braves who blocked us. We needed all ten teams to support us by the rules at that time and had nine votes. Everyone in the room voted for us except my old friend Bill Bartholomay.
It’s funny, but I’ve never told anyone that until now. Some people—Pete Rose, for instance—don’t believe it, but I don’t hold grudges. I learned from my father that in business you turn the page, move on to what’s next. You keep looking forward, not backward.
I didn’t hate the Braves. I really didn’t. In fact, as early as 1972 we brought the Braves back here for an exhibition game with the Brewers. Henry Aaron was in the middle of that. Bill Bartholomay and I developed a really good relationship through the years. He’s become one of my very best friends.
Let’s face it. Milwaukee isn’t a large market. It’s like Baltimore or St. Louis. It’s a baseball town, but it’s not a big market. There’s no question that hurt us trying to get another team. Milwaukee had this great run with the Braves, but our attendance had dropped off. The Braves had a lot of complaints and people in baseball bought ’em. As hard as we tried, it did not seem like we were making progress. We had a lot of ups and downs, but mostly downs.
The White Sox played at County Stadium the night after that vote, so I couldn’t pout long. We wound up averaging almost thirty thousand per game for the nine relocated White Sox games—pretty impressive considering that their games at Comiskey Park averaged only about nine thousand. Art Allyn didn’t have to think hard to renew our deal for 1969, this time with eleven games moving from the South Side to Milwaukee.
Eckert was quietly convinced it was his time to “retire.” Bowie Kuhn, my friend from our days in litigation, was picked to replace him.
The Seattle Pilots paid us a visit in 1969, along with their manager, Joe Schultz. His marvelously profane vocabulary would be immortalized by Jim Bouton in Ball Four. I didn’t give the Pilots much of a thought when they were passing through, but I could see what an uphill fight it was for those expansion teams to compete.
Still, I watched the expansion teams with envy. Anything’s possible when you have a team, even if it’s a bad team. The Sox games in Milwaukee weren’t quite as popular in ’69 as they had been the summer before, but still drew about three times as many fans per game as they averaged at Comiskey Park.
When I approached Art Allyn about renewing the deal for the 1970 season, he shocked me.
“I may sell the White Sox,” he told me. “Are you interested?”
Of course I was interested. I hadn’t seen this opportunity coming, but I was ready with my group of partners. We began a process that would lead to months of negotiations. We offered $10.8 million for the team, but he wanted a little more. He eventually accepted our offer of $11.5 million on Labor Day. We shook on the deal, and it seemed like all that was left was to decide whether to keep the name White Sox or change it to Brewers.
But the deal fell apart quicker than it came together. Art called me and said his brother John wouldn’t let him sell the team. John was buying out Art’s share and keeping the team in Chicago. I think Art was embarrassed. I know I was gutted. But only for a brief instant.
You won’t believe this, but it’s true.
At the very moment Art Allyn was giving me the bad news, I was reading the Milwaukee Sentinel. There was a story in it saying that the Pilots were having serious financial troubles. One of their owners, Dewey Soriano, was quoted saying that they weren’t willing to keep losing money on the team, which was playing in a horrible ballpark.
I figured why not give Soriano a call.
He was happy to hear from me, let me tell you. He wanted to know when I could come out to Seattle to meet him. I asked him if he was really serious about selling the team, because I couldn’t stand the thought of having the rug pulled out from under my partners again. Dewey put his brother Max on the phone and he assured me that they would love to find a buyer and get out of the baseball business.
After a trip to Seattle and some back-and-forth with the Sorianos, we struck a deal to buy the Pilots for $10.8 million, which had been our original offer for the White Sox. It would have been the largest price ever paid for a team. It was just before game 1 of the World Series and we were in Baltimore for the game. I saw the commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, before game 2 and brought him up to date on our deal. He wasn’t happy, telling me he wanted to keep a team in Seattle.
I don’t know if I was bluffing or not, but I told him that if we didn’t get this team we were out. I couldn’t keep putting my partners through the drama, and it was taking a toll on me and my family.
“If you guys don’t want us, then you don’t want us,” I told him.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he said. It wasn’t us, but that baseball didn’t want to get dragged into court again after spending two years involved in litigation with Milwaukee. I had a hard time arguing with him.
Kuhn immediately began an effort to find an ownership group that would keep the team in Seattle. It was the right thing for him to do, and I would have done it if I had been the commissioner. But it was painful waking up every day wondering what was going on in Seattle.
The process was still going on when the Pilots went to spring training for their second season. There was a report that the American League had advanced the franchise $650,000 so it could stay in business. Things clearly weren’t going well. As I’d later learn, the Pilots were going into bankruptcy. Our $10.8 million would pay off their debts and give them a clean break. One snowy day in March, I got a call from AL president Joe Cronin asking me if we were ready.
“Believe me, we’re ready to go,” I said. “We have a ballpark. We have the money. We’re ready.” I didn’t know what to think when I got off the phone. I thought this was a good sign, but we knew we couldn’t count on anything, especially something as crazy as getting a team in the middle of spring training.
The month of March dragged by with no resolution. Finally, on the night of March 31, about ten thirty, I got a call from Lloyd Larson, sports editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel.
“Ya got it!” he said, then hung up to get his newspaper out.
My lawyer, Bud Zarwell, called two minutes later saying he had good news. I told him that Lloyd had already called, and we both had a laugh.
The bankruptcy judge, Sidney C. Volinn, had awarded us the team. I asked if anything could go wrong from here and he told me we were in the clear. Our group really did own the Brewers. I was thirty-five years old and owned a piece of a baseball team that I was going to run. Opening Day was a week away.
7
DON’T ASK TOO many questions about the Brewers’ first season in Milwaukee. It was a blur when I lived it and much of it is still a blur. But I remember being happy. Very, very happy. I barely even
noticed that we lost ninety-seven games. This was the only time in my life I was a good loser.
I didn’t have any extra time or energy to agonize over the outcome of games. I was finding out how fast they come at you when they’re your games.
When Judge Volinn awarded us the team, the equipment truck had already left Arizona. It was parked in Salt Lake City awaiting word whether to take Interstate 15 north toward Seattle or veer east on Interstate 80, through Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa toward Milwaukee. The Pilots’ traveling secretary, Tommy Ferguson, had worked for the Braves. He was about the only person with the franchise I knew.
We were the Brewers from the start, not the Pilots, but we had no uniforms, so we’d have to modify the ones on the equipment truck that were designed for the Pilots. The Pilots’ colors were blue and gold, and those became the Brewers’ colors. We wore the uniforms that they had planned to wear in Seattle. We changed the logos on the caps, switching out the letter S for an M. Real creative, huh?
I was getting so many phone calls, I needed a switchboard operator. I hired a woman named Betty Grant to help with the phones, and she would stay with us for forty years. That’s the kind of franchise I wanted to run—a solid business that was built around its people. I wanted familiar faces, not constant turnover.
One thing I’ll never forget about that time is that Coach Lombardi took time to send me a telegram congratulating me on getting a team. That keepsake is still on display in my office. It’s a wonder it didn’t go in the trash can, because those were crazy, crazy days.
We didn’t just have to sell tickets for a season that was starting in a week; we had to print tickets. But when the day arrived—in the blink of an eye, after a wait that until a week earlier had seemed endless—somehow we accommodated a crowd of 36,107 on Opening Day. Andy Messersmith and the Angels would beat us 12–0. But I was the one lighting up a victory Tiparillo.
I was leaving the park that night and a fan said something I’ve never forgotten. “Well, you wanted baseball in the worst way, and that’s what you’ve got,” he said. I laughed like I hadn’t even looked at the scoreboard. The city was happy to have a team to call its own but slow to trust us. I didn’t blame them, either, because I longed for the days of Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn, and Red Schoendienst as much as anyone. We knew we faced a challenge creating a tradition of our own that would make fans proud.
One tradition did start that year, although maybe not in the way you’d think. Bernie Brewer was created accidentally when we took up one of our fans, Milt Mason, on his crazy idea to remain atop the County Stadium scoreboard until we drew a crowd of forty thousand fans. I still don’t know why Milt did it, but he was retired and loved the team. He went up on the scoreboard in late June, with some of our people figuring out how to get a camper up there for him to sleep in, and he stayed until Bat Day against the Indians, on August 16. We drew 44,387, and after the crowd size was announced Milt slid down a rope. The fans loved it.
Three years later our marketing guys—probably Dick Hackett, who had left the White Sox to join us that first season—got the idea to honor Milt by creating a mascot who would wear lederhosen and descend down a slide into an oversized beer mug. I never did go down that slide myself, but I know a lot of our players did over the years.
About a week after I got the team, Bowie Kuhn called. I think he was relieved we’d finally gotten a team, because he’d seen what we were doing from the start, when he was an attorney for the National League. Once we got the team he was great with me. He was calling this time to tell me about an upcoming owners meeting in New York.
I was the new guy, there to listen and not to speak, but I’ll never forget what I heard and saw at the first owners meeting I attended. Marvin Miller, who had been a leading negotiator for the United Steelworkers, had been hired to lead the players union in 1966. He was having an immediate impact in baseball. I’d heard about it from the Orioles’ Jerry Hoffberger and my other friends in ownership, but now I was about to see it for myself.
Curt Flood had been traded from the Cardinals to the Phillies the previous October. He responded by sending a letter to Bowie saying he planned to play baseball in 1970 but not necessarily for the Phillies. He was challenging the reserve clause, which essentially tied a player to his club on a perpetual basis, and there is no question he was right to do that. Baseball should have modified the reserve clause years earlier, maybe decades earlier. But these guys were behind the times. Because Flood hadn’t gone to spring training, I was expecting us to talk about him at the New York meeting. But it barely even came up—instead many owners were focused on the union. We were in negotiations on a collective bargaining agreement, and funding pensions for players was the issue that was the focus for my fellow owners.
It was as nasty a meeting as I’ve ever been in. Messy, really messy. Bowie seated me right between Gussie Busch and Phil Wrigley at that meeting, and Gussie was mad. He kept pounding his cane so much he actually broke it.
“Not another goddamn cent,” Gussie said. “Do you understand that, Bowie? Not one more goddamn cent.”
Bowie got red in the face, but he was no match for Gussie Busch and those other old-school owners, who seemed to think Kenesaw Mountain Landis was still the commissioner. They couldn’t get used to the fact that players were now represented by a union and had a say in the business. That wasn’t the way it used to be. These owners were determined to stay in the Stone Age. They just wanted the game to stay exactly as it had always been.
It was an education, and the first of many encounters I’d have with people who wanted to keep this game exactly as it was—regardless of the impact that would have on the players, on the fans, or even ultimately on the game of baseball itself.
The scene was one that I’d encounter over and over again, and one that came to take more meaning after one of my first such meetings as an owner. While on our way to LaGuardia Airport, I learned a lesson I would never forget from John Fetzer, the owner of the Tigers, who would become my most important mentor.
During the meeting, Mr. Fetzer had voted in favor of a proposal I had thought he would oppose. It seemed to me it worked against the Tigers. But when I asked about it, in the cab to LaGuardia, he had a quick answer.
“This is good for baseball,” he said. “If I always do what’s in the best interest of baseball, it will be in the best interest of the Detroit baseball club. Remember that. If you do what’s in the best interest of baseball, it will be in the best interest of the Milwaukee baseball club.”
Though I had much to learn about ownership, one thing I knew from the start was that scouting and player development are the keys to a successful operation, especially in a market like Milwaukee, where you can’t really shop for free agents like the Yankees and Red Sox.
One of my more questionable moves on that front was when I hired Bob Uecker to be a scout for us in the early days. When I was attending Washington High, Bob was across town at Milwaukee Tech. He was signed by the Braves while I was in Madison and he spent six years climbing through the farm system. We met in ’62, when Bob was the backup catcher behind Del Crandall. It didn’t take long for us to become good friends—he has an infectious personality and is the funniest person I’ve ever known. We stayed in touch.
After a journeyman career as a backup catcher, he came back to Milwaukee with a .200 batting average after six years in the National League, finally running out of teams that needed a wisecracking backup catcher. I hired him as a scout and our general manager, Frank Lane, sent him up to the Northern League, with teams in places like Fargo, Duluth, and Winnipeg. Not exactly the big time, but a good organization needs eyes everywhere.
One day Frank comes steaming up the stairs into my office with a bunch of paper in his hands. “What the hell is wrong with your guy, Uecker?” he says. “He just sent in his first scouting reports and there’s mashed potatoes and gravy all over them!”
Turned out scouting wasn’t Bob’s calling. Broadcasting
was. We put him on the air in ’71 and he’s been doing play-by-play for the Brewers ever since. His knowledge of the game shows up every inning he’s on the air.
It was probably for the best that we got Bob off the road and into the booth, because given the size of our market, we needed scouts who could find talent. From the start, I was looking to emulate the Orioles and the Royals more than any other teams. Baltimore and Kansas City were similar markets, and from the top down were really well-run organizations. The early years were tough for us because the team we bought was woefully short on talent. There were some nice people who came from Seattle, but we were way behind the teams we were competing against.
The Royals were in the same type situation but had a head start on us. Those guys were so smart—Joe Burke, John Schuerholz, Whitey Herzog—that it was no surprise they started winning their division every year from ’76 on. They had struck gold with George Brett in one of their first few drafts. We were hoping to do the same.
I only stuck with Frank Lane as GM for two seasons before promoting a scout named Jim Wilson to the position. Wilson had brought a young man named Jim Baumer with him from Houston when we hired him, and I made Baumer the scouting director. This was the team that was tasked with helping us draft our way into the competition.
The draft that changed things for us was ’73. We had the third pick, behind the Rangers and the Phillies. Wilson and Baumer both spent the spring flying all over the country to see high school and college players, mostly high school, because college baseball wasn’t very good in those years.
As the draft approached, there were split opinions in the front office on our first pick. Baumer wanted us to take this kid from Woodland Hills, California, Robin Yount. But Wilson, who was Baumer’s boss and the guy who’d brought him to us in the first place, was pushing for Rich Shubert, a big left-handed pitcher from New York. The two of them got into this huge fight—fierce, loud, and filled with expletives. It was really, really heated. Baumer wouldn’t back down, even though his boss was telling him he was making the wrong choice. Eventually Wilson told him he could make the pick he wanted, but he was still angry. I don’t think they ever really spoke again, and Wilson resigned after they’d worked one more draft together.
