by Bud Selig
With new ballparks in cities where they were badly needed, we created a model built for the future. Seldom did they get built without controversy over financing or location, but they have been a source of civic pride for so many cities, including my Milwaukee.
San Francisco might provide the ultimate example of how a new ballpark can revitalize both a city and a franchise. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Candlestick Park, but I’ll tell you that you didn’t miss much if you weren’t there. I know it carved out its niche with Giants fans, but the location, right on the water, in an area of the city that was known for cold, swirling winds, was a disaster.
Candlestick was impossible. The Giants shared Candlestick with the 49ers, and Bob Lurie was constantly trying to get a new stadium. He lost three or four stadium measures before he himself came close to selling the team to a group that was going to move it to the Tampa Bay area.
Eventually the Giants’ new ownership group, headed by Peter Magowan and Larry Baer, put together a public-private partnership to build AT&T Park in an area of San Francisco known as the China Basin. It was an old area of warehouses and run-down buildings when the plans were drawn up. Now it is one of the gleaming areas in the city, not only a great place to play baseball but a hub for economic development.
That’s how the recent generations of ballparks have worked. I often talk about baseball as a part of community trust, how baseball has a social responsibility. The new ballparks are a great demonstration of that.
While they benefit the clubs, for sure, they also benefit the cities. They provide jobs and stir economies. It is genuinely a great partnership and has made a life-and-death difference for a lot of franchises, including the one in Milwaukee.
Wendy, my daughter, was in charge of the Brewers while I tackled baseball’s biggest challenges, but I had a deeply personal investment in the stadium situation. I knew replacing County Stadium was necessary for the survival of the franchise that had given Milwaukee a second chance at being a baseball town. Because we were the smallest market in the major leagues, we needed to maximize revenues if the Brewers were going to be competitive enough to reward fans for the passion they invested in the team.
We didn’t just reach that conclusion in the 1990s, when so many other teams were opening stadiums. I had seen this coming for a long time. I loved County Stadium more than anyone in Milwaukee, but for me the need for a new stadium was like a toothache that starts long before you find yourself at the dentist. I could feel it for years before I allowed the issue to become a public matter. I knew I couldn’t let an antiquated stadium become the reason that the Brewers failed, not after the heartache I experienced when the Braves moved to Atlanta. I knew I couldn’t allow that to happen again. It was unthinkable.
At my urging, the Greater Milwaukee Committee—the same organization that was responsible for County Stadium forty years earlier—appointed a task force to study the issue in 1987. That was the start of an agonizingly painful process that often crawled or seemed stalled until Miller Park became a reality in 1995 and finally was ready for baseball in 2001.
I remember being in Toronto when the SkyDome opened. It had a roof to keep fans warm and dry, a hotel in left field, and the Hard Rock Cafe in right field. McDonald’s ran the concessions. As much as I marveled about what the Blue Jays had accomplished with the help of financing from Toronto and the province of Ontario, I must admit I was feeling a little bit heartsick about our franchise. How could we compete with this?
It was clear we needed not only a new stadium but one with a roof, which would increase the cost of the project significantly. The journey to get our new ballpark built would be torturous and require patience over many years. The plus for me was that I was traveling it with my daughter, as Wendy was by my side every step of the way. She would step out on her own in these negotiations because I was preoccupied with the bigger issues in baseball.
When I look back on it, I still shake my head over how painful the process became. It really didn’t have to be so contentious. We experienced some political defeats along the way that were crushing, especially when I compared them to the vision of the civic leaders who had built County Stadium before Milwaukee even had a team to play there. Those guys had the vision and the will to see how a stadium could draw a team in to make the whole city better. What had happened to that spirit?
We were desperately trying to stay here, to make baseball work in Milwaukee for decades to come. There was no other agenda. That’s what made the opposition we faced so stunning to me. The way we were treated along the way made this the most disappointing time of my career.
We had a lot of really strong people on our side, including Mike Grebe, an influential lawyer and civic leader who was close to Tommy Thompson, who was then the Wisconsin governor. We had Thompson’s support, and I thought we would be able to count on it throughout the process, in part because of the connection with Grebe. But somewhere along the way we lost Thompson. I believe others had convinced him that supporting the stadium measure wasn’t a popular position for him to take. He made a political judgment, and he was wrong. That’s what I never understood. We weren’t threatening to move. I never listened to overtures from other cities. Charlotte was interested, but I never talked to them.
As the person primarily responsible for bringing baseball to Milwaukee all those years earlier, it was hard not to take all this personally. Considering the unlikely way I had landed the Brewers in 1970, and again the pain I’d experienced when the Braves packed up and left Milwaukee, I simply couldn’t consider abandoning my hometown. It just wasn’t in my DNA, and I knew it. Everyone knew it, I think. I couldn’t let the legacy of all my efforts be that the team’s financial situation prevented it from staying where it belonged. Nothing over the previous three decades would have been possible if we hadn’t fought so hard to make Milwaukee a baseball town. But suddenly we were faced with the prospect that it could end. If the Brewers couldn’t upgrade their stadium situation, at some point the team would have to leave. What was in these rejections for Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin? They were never going to get another team.
I’ll never forget the drive home from Madison after one setback. It felt like a nail in our coffin, and the mood on the way back to Milwaukee was gloomy. This was probably the lowest point for me. Wendy and the other people in the car asked what we were going to do. I said we would keep trying. I think they thought I was crazy. They certainly couldn’t believe I was going to go on.
What else was I going to do? Of course I was going to go on. We were going to get this done. I would have liked to have told those people to go take a hike, believe me. I’d like to have done that, but that wouldn’t help me get a new stadium. We couldn’t survive without the stadium and I wasn’t going to let Milwaukee lose its baseball team, the team I’d worked so hard to bring to the city all those years ago. Not on my watch.
We regrouped and, in the end, we won. That’s we as in all of us in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. I am so proud of how Wendy problem-solved and persevered through some angry and ugly confrontations with politicians and produced a state-of-the-art ballpark that has allowed the franchise to draw more than three million fans in three different seasons.
The Brewers have played there for eighteen seasons now, with the annual average attendance about 2.7 million. Milwaukee is the smallest market in the majors but finished tenth in attendance in 2018 and is likely to do even better in ’19. That’s pretty spectacular, if you ask me. Thank goodness Wendy persevered.
She had a lot of help along the way. From the start, Wendy put together a group of community leaders who were dedicated to the cause. We were so thankful for the work of Jim Keyes of Johnson Controls; Jack McDonough, the chairman and CEO of Miller Brewing; Jack McKeithan, a former chairman of Schlitz Brewing; Jim Ericson of Northwestern Mutual; Bob Kahlor, chairman and CEO of Journal Communications; Roger Fitzsimonds of First Wisconsin; Frank Busalacchi of the Teamsters; and Tim Sheehy of the Metropolitan Mil
waukee Association of Commerce. State assemblyman David Prosser and Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament were helpful from the start.
Wendy was a warrior in the fights at city hall and at the statehouse. She was involved not only in the grueling political aspects but also in the design and construction that have made Miller Park a prototype for other new ballparks, especially those with retractable roofs.
I witnessed some of the worst, most Machiavellian behavior you can imagine. I had politicians—including our governor at the time, Thompson, and our mayor, John Norquist—routinely say one thing to my face and do the opposite behind my back.
We eventually got it done with a public-private partnership, with dozens of people working tirelessly behind the scenes—even Henry Aaron stepped up to help—and with committed people who believed that, in the end, Miller Park would be good for the city. They believed, correctly, that it would not only be good from a financial standpoint—studies show it adds $330 million a year to the Wisconsin economy—but have a sociological benefit.
I’ll never forget the sacrifice made by George Petak, a state legislator from Racine. He helped us get across the finish line because he knew it was good for his home state even if public funding was a divisive issue. George was convinced Milwaukee would lose the Brewers without a new stadium. He was subsequently voted out of office by residents of his county but went out as one of my heroes for how he helped make Miller Park a reality. He was like me. He understood the impact baseball can have on a community.
When the project was in trouble, we received a huge late lift from Michael Joyce, president of the Bradley Foundation, one of the biggest and most respected foundations in the country. His support, along with Tim Sheehy’s, rallied other local business leaders who were supportive of the stadium effort.
We got Miller Park built because, truly, our fans wanted it, and ultimately, our fans demanded it. I knew what we needed was a midwestern version of SkyDome, but that didn’t exactly fit in the Brewers’ budget. The challenge was how to build a partnership with local governments to help finance it. We had many tough days, many painful days, many days when there just didn’t seem to be a way out. Yet we pressed on. That’s the way I had achieved every victory in my career—with perseverance in the face of skepticism.
Miller Park opened on April 6, 2001, with the Reds back in town. Wendy and her husband, Laurel Prieb, had added so many wonderful touches to the ballpark, from an innovative kids’ zone to décor that only people who really loved the game could have imagined. But Bernie Brewer still had his slide.
My friend George W. Bush came through for me. He told me he’d be honored to throw out a ceremonial first pitch for our first game, and I was honored to have him in town. I was going to throw out a first pitch, too. Yount warmed me up in our new batting cages beforehand. President Bush warmed up, too, but not quite enough, as it turned out. He bounced a ball to the plate, perhaps because he was wearing a bulletproof vest underneath his shirt.
I thought of a million different things that night, including Wendy’s tenacity and the sacrifice of George Petak. I thought a lot about three construction workers who were killed in a horrible crane accident during construction and the thousands of other workers who could point with pride to the bricks they laid, the grass they planted, the signs they hung. I was so very grateful to so many people.
Without new ballparks, along with changes in baseball’s antiquated economic systems, a lot of teams would have been out of business. Maybe ten teams, maybe twelve teams. All the small markets. I know critics dismiss this reality, but that’s how truly desperate these times were.
Bringing stadiums into the modern era was a huge step forward for baseball.
Stadiums weren’t the only area in which we were taking action to modernize baseball as we tried to get beyond the pain everyone experienced in 1994–95.
Interleague play was the oldest “new” idea in baseball. Some point to talks taking place to have regular-season games between our two leagues as far back as the 1930s. I can’t swear to that, but I was privy to a push for it in 1973, when Bowie Kuhn was the commissioner. I know that Hank Greenberg, the Hall of Fame first baseman of the Tigers, had been an advocate. So too was Bill Veeck, who never really had the influence to pull it off. There was talk about it in ’73, when we adopted the designated hitter rule, but the two leagues weren’t capable of working together.
I was actually on the committee that discussed interleague play in ’73, working with Frank Dale of the Cincinnati Reds. We came up with a plan. We’d have a six-game interleague schedule running into the All-Star break every year, with the opponents switching around annually. I pitched it to American League owners and they were sold. But we needed the National League’s approval, and I don’t think it got out of the gate with them. Walter O’Malley was against it, and everyone generally followed his lead.
The rivalry between leagues was good on one level but turned into an impediment to progress. I don’t want to put this too strongly, but there were times the leagues despised each other. You would think people would have understood we were in this business together, but for too much of our history it was the opposite. The game was still stuck in neutral in so many ways, and, like adding the wild card, I thought interleague play was an idea we could use to build some momentum and get back on solid footing.
For a while after we got back on the field in ’95 I brought interleague play up at every meeting. We formed a committee to study it. We were also studying expansion, from twenty-eight teams to thirty.
We were adding teams in Phoenix and Tampa Bay. Even though Arizona was going to the NL and Tampa Bay to the AL, we needed one team to change leagues. It didn’t work to have fifteen teams in both leagues unless you were going to have interleague play every day, and we were only pushing for it on a limited basis, at least at the start.
That meant we needed a team to change leagues. My daughter Wendy, who had done such a great job on the stadium effort in Milwaukee, immediately saw the wisdom of moving from the AL to the NL, which would help the Brewers travel and create a major rivalry with the Cubs. But I was focused on the Royals, pitching David Glass on the idea of having rivalry games with the Cardinals as well as the Cubs. He wasn’t sold, so I told him to take his time.
It was one of the few times that Wendy Selig was miffed at the commissioner.
“You gave him four to six months to think about it?” she asked me. “You never gave me four to six months to think about anything.”
Well, she may have had a point. But in the end Glass did not want to switch leagues. There was no better option than Milwaukee. We vetted the issue at an owners meeting, with an abundance of caution. No one objected to the Brewers joining the NL Central.
The Brewers’ move worked out well, as has interleague play. Traditionalists complained that interleague play would water down the All-Star Game or even the World Series, but I knew from the start the positives were much greater than the perceived negatives. We should have added interleague play much earlier than we did, and when we did it was like the wild card—a common sense move that demonstrated baseball had moved into a new era.
The first interleague game was played in Arlington on June 12, with Barry Bonds’s Giants beating Ivan Rodriguez’s Rangers. But the series that were the most fun were played a little later in the season, when the Mets visited Yankee Stadium, the Cubs played on the South Side of Chicago, and the A’s crossed the Bay Bridge to play the Giants. There’s such anticipation for games between crosstown rivals, even when the teams aren’t strong. It just makes sense to schedule games that fans want to see. Interleague play was a smart idea, and it hasn’t hurt the World Series or the All-Star Game one iota.
The best idea we had in that era was the simplest one.
We decided to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier by retiring his number, 42, on April 15.
I’m so proud of my predecessors in baseball for opening the doors to
Jackie in 1947. It was a terrific message to signal to America—that color didn’t matter. It didn’t matter then and it never should have mattered. But progress came slowly in many parts of our society.
Branch Rickey signed Jackie in 1945. He played minor league baseball in Montreal in ’46 and then was at Ebbets Field in ’47. You can’t overstate the kind of a pioneer you got with Robinson.
This was more than a year before President Truman desegregated the United States Army. It was seven years before the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. It was seventeen years before the Civil Rights Act.
Baseball was leading the nation, and Robinson was the right man for the job.
“What if Jackie hadn’t come along?” Henry Aaron has often asked me.
Len Coleman, who was the National League president, played a key role in our deciding to retire Robinson’s No. 42 all across baseball. There was unanimous support for it throughout baseball. We planned the announcement for Shea Stadium in New York. I had lunch with Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, at the Plaza hotel that afternoon. I could have listened to her stories all afternoon.
She told me how Hank Greenberg encouraged Jackie, with an unusual perspective. Greenberg was playing for the Pirates then but had spent most of his career in Detroit, where he took a lot of abuse for being Jewish. He weathered it and over time became a revered player, both in Detroit and everywhere else.
When Robinson reached first base in a game in Pittsburgh, Greenberg told him he was doing great. “Don’t let ’em get to you, kid,” Greenberg told Robinson. “You’re going to be all right.”
Robinson never forgot that support.
