CHAPTER FOUR
MILWAUKEE
IT WAS A strange way to start a renaissance, by leaving a big town full of history and power and influence for a medium-sized midwestern town with an inferiority complex, virtually anonymous, both in terms of national prominence and importance on the baseball map.
Since the end of the Spanish-American War, the Braves had been looking for love, and they never quite found it in Boston. The team was formed in 1871, thirty years before the Red Sox, first as the Boston Red Stockings of the National Association and then, in 1876, as the Boston Red Caps, one of the inaugural eight franchises of the newly formed National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. The Red Caps finished fourth that year, but they were fortified by an admirable stamina—they didn’t finish in the money, but they remained in business. Neither the New York Mutuals nor the Philadelphia Athletics (both of which were expelled after one season) could say that. The Hartford Dark Blues, the St. Louis Brown Stockings, and the Louisville Grays all folded after the league’s second season. The Cincinnati Red Stockings were expelled by the league following the 1880 season, in part for the high offense of selling beer to fans. Of the original eight franchises that comprised the National Association, only the Chicago White Stockings (later to become the Cubs) and the Red Caps would survive the years.
For a time, life in Boston was beautiful. The franchise played in Roxbury, at the South End Grounds and later at Braves Field, both parks within throwing distance of Fenway Park, later the home of the newly formed Red Sox in the upstart American League. The Braves were an immediate dynasty, winning four pennants in the five-year existence of the National Association, and in their first twenty-two years after joining the National League, they won eight more. The team was managed by accomplished baseball men Harry Wright and Frank Selee, men who would wind up in Cooperstown, and it would forever live in memory for the magical year of 1914, the year the Braves were in last place, sporting a record of 33–43, eleven and a half games back of John McGraw’s New York Giants on July 15, and yet the Braves were popping corks by October, finishing the season winning sixty-one of their final seventy-seven games, to end up with the pennant, ten and a half games in first. The “Miracle Braves,” as they would be known forever more, completed the conquest a week later, sweeping Connie Mack’s legendary Philadelphia A’s in four straight in the 1914 World Series.
Over the years, the name changed, from the Red Caps to the Beaneaters to the Doves to the Rustlers to the Braves to the Bees and, finally and permanently, in 1941, back to the Braves. Yet three truths remained constant: The first was that despite the changing nickname, the team always remained a bedrock constant in Boston. The second was that once the twentieth century began, the Braves were patently awful. It didn’t matter if the manager was Rogers Hornsby (50–103 in 1928) or Casey Stengel (373–491, for a .432 winning percentage over six seasons), or the players were Walter “Rabbit” Maranville or a forty-year-old fat and finished Babe Ruth (.181 batting average in twenty-three games for a team that would finish 38–115 in 1935). In the seasons between the Miracle Braves and the 1948 club that surprised everyone by winning the pennant (and were one agonizing one-game play-off away from playing the Red Sox in what would have been the only all-Boston World Series), the Braves finished in the second division. That was the kind way of saying fifth place, or worse—twenty-six times in the thirty-two seasons between pennants.
The third truth was that almost from the start, the American League Red Sox possessed an uncanny ability to attract attention in a way their august, stiffer National League counterparts certainly could not. The Red Sox arrived in 1901, and they were champions by 1903 after winning the first-ever World Series between the rival leagues, dousing Pittsburgh in a raucous affair. While the Braves puttered around in the muddy old confines of the South End Grounds in Roxbury, the Red Sox built their grand ballpark, Fenway Park, in the Fenway section of town in 1912. The Red Sox were interesting in victory and defeat during the teen years, building a following with championship teams in 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918. The Braves were established, but the Red Sox were exciting, with big names and bigger personalities—among them Cy Young, “Smokey Joe” Wood, Tris Speaker, and, of course, one George Herman Ruth—names so big that, despite the unquestioned dominance of the Braves before the Red Sox ever existed, future generations would accept as fact that Boston always had been an American League town.
It was a momentum that never slowed. Thomas A. Yawkey purchased the Red Sox in 1933, and the Braves had no one to compete with the headline-generating bombast of Ted Williams or Yawkey’s fruitless opulence. Winning the pennant in 1948 did not change the Braves second-place status, and Frank Lane, the general manager of the Chicago White Sox, began to articulate a prediction about the future that seemed too scary, too foreign to accept as anything but radical.
“Two-club cities, with the exception of New York and Chicago,” Lane said, “are doomed.”
MILWAUKEE WAS ONCE a big-league town. The year was 1901, the first year of the American League, and the team, the Milwaukee Brewers, was ironically an early incarnation of the St. Louis Browns/Baltimore Orioles. The Brewers that year won forty-eight games (out of 137, a winning percentage of .350, good for last place) in their only season in Milwaukee before moving to St. Louis. It wasn’t that the good people of Milwaukee (“Good Burghers,” the press called them) didn’t love their baseball, but more that the barons, who ran the game, didn’t exactly love them back. Another edition of the Milwaukee Brewers arrived in 1902 and played in the minor-league American Association for the next fifty years, and that’s what Milwaukee would be, minor-league, through two world wars and the Depression. For a time, being called “minor-league” did not sting, for the city took pride in its baseball team and Borchert Field, its rickety old home, adopting the position that it, like much of the rest of the custom and personality of Milwaukee, may not have translated easily to the outside world but, inside, was representative of how the community viewed itself.
Milwaukee was a city founded by French fur traders and speculators. Nestled on the western edge of Lake Michigan, it united originally by conflict. Two independent, rival communities—Juneautown on the east banks of the Milwaukee River, founded by Solomon Juneau, and Kilbourntown, on the west, founded by Byron Kilbourn—lived in relative hostility during the early 1840s. When the Kilbourntown supporters dumped a whole section of a proposed drawbridge into the river, ostensibly to hamper and isolate the economic prospects of Juneautown, the famous Milwaukee Bridge War ensued. The weeks of fighting resulted in the unification of the two factions into one city in 1845.
The French arrived first, but the enduring fabric of the city was shaped by the heavy influx of German immigrants in the mid-1800s and the social and political customs they brought to their new world. There would be lasting examples of the city’s uniqueness. Milwaukee would be the only major American city to elect three Socialist mayors, and even as late as World War I, no city outside of New York City would house as many different immigrant groups as would Milwaukee. And in line with its German-Austrian immigrant roots, there would be agriculture and education and social progressiveness and beer, not always in that order.
The population surged, and the powerful German heritage mixed with that of the fast-rising pockets of Poles, Jews, Hungarians and Austrians, and some Western European immigrants (the first Milwaukee City Hall, built in 1891, was designed in the Flemish Renaissance style). During the first fifty years of incorporation, Milwaukee grew from roughly 20,000 residents to nearly 300,000. Between 1880 and 1890 alone, the population grew by 76 percent. World War I threatened the social fabric of the city as the allegiance of German immigrants was tested, prompting the Milwaukee Journal to inflame tensions by accusing the Germania-Herold, the German newspaper, of disloyalty. The sensibilities of Milwaukee Germans were so frayed that by the end of the war, many believed Prohibition became a reality in part as a reaction to a disturbing backlash of anti-German sentiment
. Still, the city grew. By the late 1940s, the population exceeded 600,000 (times were so good that even the Milwaukee Journal, on the flag of the paper, right next to the weather and the date, listed its circulation, proof of its muscle, its upward mobility). In the years following World War II, with the population booming, Milwaukee wanted more. It wanted baseball, big-league baseball, and there was no longer anything quaint or endearing about the term minor-league.
The layers of change that enveloped baseball in the early 1950s were not limited to white players growing accustomed to having black teammates. The changes also presented a challenge to the barons of the game to see more clearly beyond the confining borders of the past and determine which of them possessed the vision to navigate a fluid future.
No team had relocated since 1903, when the Baltimore Orioles moved to become the New York Highlanders, or its better-known nom de voyage, the Yankees, but the larger forces of postwar expansion and advances in technology and travel could not be suppressed. Frank Lane had predicted that the two-team city structure that had been a fixture since the turn of the century was dead, and only the most stubborn owners could disagree with him. There was a new baseball phrase for the growing number of cities in an expanding America that hungered for baseball. The term—big-league ready—was one that only a few members of the old guard were ready to adopt, but Braves owner Lou Perini and Cubs owner Phillip K. Wrigley were baseball’s two biggest evangelists for expansion. “The entire map of Organized Baseball should be reorganized so that baseball can keep pace with the growth of the nation,” Wrigley said in 1951. It was a sentiment that spoke directly to Lou Perini.
Louis Perini was a New Englander, born and raised in the rural town of Ashland, Massachusetts, about twenty miles west of Boston. Yet Perini was never limited in his worldview. As a boy, he worked for his father’s construction company, and according to the family legend, six-year-old Louis would fetch pails of water for his father’s crew of hungry workers. In 1924, when Louis was twenty-one, his father died and left the family construction business to his sons. Louis became president of the new company, and even through the Depression years, he was able to amass and maintain a hefty fortune. Nearing the end of World War II, in January 1944, Lou Perini partnered with Joseph Maney and Guido Rugo, along with a consortium of minority partners, to purchase a controlling interest in the Braves from Bob Quinn. The three construction men turned baseball owners were known as “the Three Little Steam Shovels,” and their first order of business was to bounce Stengel as manager and revive the moribund franchise. Within three years, the Braves were contenders. In the fourth, in 1948, the Braves drew 1.3 million fans and won the pennant, although they lost to Cleveland in the World Series.
Lou Perini saw himself as a visionary, and compared to the owners whose idea of progress was to view the coming of television as the death of baseball, he was. Perini believed in expansion. In the 1940s, he wanted baseball scouts to begin searching in Europe—both to in his words, “spread the gospel of the game” and to develop new talent markets outside of the United States. Perini believed Los Angeles deserved a baseball team, and he saw California as the great growth area of the country. “And let’s interpolate this opinion: in 25 years California will have more people than any state in the U.S.A.,” he said in 1951. “Can the major leagues afford to stand still?” He thought Milwaukee and Houston were “big-league ready,” which was where one of his key visions entered the picture in 1951: a twelve-team league with franchises in California, Montreal, Mexico City, and even Havana, Cuba.
For a time, Perini did not believe his own club a candidate for relocation, and he had his reasons. One was his commitment to Boston. In the years 1947 through 1949, both the Braves and Red Sox drew over one million fans, suggesting that if both clubs fielded competitive teams, the city possessed the resources and will to support both. But the Braves never outdrew the Red Sox during those years, and at least some of the attendance figures on both sides were boosted by American euphoria over the end of the war years. Cleveland, for example, drew 2.6 million fans when it won the World Series in 1948, but the next season, when pennant-winning clubs usually enjoyed a significant spike in attendance, the team drew 400,000 fewer fans.
Another of Perini’s convictions in 1951 was that within five years the Braves would be the powerhouse in baseball, on a par with—if not better than—the Dodgers and the Yankees. One key piece—the pitcher Warren Spahn—was already in place, and in 1950, the Braves had traded for another, moving an aging Johnny Sain to the Yankees for a young right-hander named Selva Lewis Burdette. There were third baseman Eddie Mathews, the young shortstop Johnny Logan, and two black prospects, the lightning-fast outfielder Bill Bruton and George Crowe, a hard-hitting first baseman. Even more promising for Perini was that at each level the Braves farm system had been tearing up the minor leagues.
In 1950, Perini invited two friends to attend the All-Star Game at Comiskey Park in Chicago, the legendary Notre Dame football coach Frank Leahy and Fred C. Miller, the president of the Miller Brewing Company. During the game, Miller asked Perini if he was interested in selling the Braves to him and expressed his intention of moving them to Milwaukee. Perini declined, but he agreed to Miller’s request that Perini not move or sell the Braves without first speaking with him. The following year, on July 1, 1951, the Boston Traveler published an item about a group of Milwaukee businessmen interested in purchasing equity in the Braves, with the intention of relocating the team to Milwaukee. Perini, not willing to accept the old Hollywood adage that the rumors are always true, laughed the story off as ridiculous. “The whole thing is utterly fantastic.51 The Braves will remain in Boston, which is where they belong,” Perini said. “I believe that some day Milwaukee will have a major-league franchise, but that will not come to pass until the entire structure of baseball is changed. I can assure everyone that the franchise that Milwaukee may obtain eventually will not be the Braves franchise.”
Less funny was the massive financial hit the Three Little Steam Shovels were taking with the Braves in Boston. In 1950, Perini lost a quarter of a million dollars. The following year, the attendance at Braves Field dropped by nearly half, to 6,250 fans per game.
Future retellings of the Braves demise would always contain a delicious element of the unknown—of what might have been had the Braves remained in Boston another few years and the flowering of the club had taken place there instead of in Milwaukee. Perini had alienated fans, in part by selling off key members of the 1948 pennant team, such as Alvin Dark, Johnny Sain, and Eddie Stanky, but a powerful young nucleus was forming on the club, just at the time when the Red Sox were about to begin a deep and precipitous slide into irrelevancy.
Bill Veeck, the iconoclastic owner of the St. Louis Browns, had realized that St. Louis was not big enough for two teams, and Veeck began searching for relocation possibilities. Suddenly, the gold rush was on, and the teams that never had a prime market to call their own were racing to find the promised land. Milwaukee was first, or a booming equivalent. Veeck wanted to move to Milwaukee, to return the Browns to their original home of fifty years earlier. A group of businessmen from Houston took an interest in purchasing the Cardinals when the owner, Fred Saigh, under federal investigation for tax irregularities, put the team up for sale. Veeck disclosed that a year before Fred Miller’s discussion with Perini at the All-Star Game in 1950, Fred Miller had contacted him and spoken of the possibility of moving the Browns to Milwaukee, and the two would speak again for the next two years, even though Veeck’s real dream was to move the Browns to Los Angeles. He’d tried in 1944, but wartime travel restrictions made it impossible for one team to be located two thousand miles from the next closest club. Plus, Veeck was never popular enough with his fellow owners to be allowed so audacious and potentially lucrative a move.
Perini held the advantage in Milwaukee. His relationship with Miller was strong and he also owned the minor-league club, the Brewers, and held an existing lease on Milwaukee County S
tadium. He promised five million dollars in stadium renovations, ostensibly for the Brewers, who had outgrown Borchert Field. The true motive for County Stadium, naturally, was to attract a big-league team. When Perini denied he would ever sell the Braves to any consortium of Milwaukee businessmen, he was being accurate, albeit in a convoluted way. Parse the words, peel off the layers of the onion, and in many ways Perini had shown his hand back in 1951. Milwaukee wouldn’t land a team “until the entire structure of baseball is changed.” It was true: He was not going to sell, but he was going to change the entire structure in one stroke. He was going to move the Braves to Milwaukee himself.
In January 1952, Perini wagered his greatest and last gamble in Boston, spending thirty thousand dollars to charter a Pan American Airways jet to publicize the star players of the Braves farm system. Perini invited five Boston writers, plus a radio commentator and his publicity man, to fly to the hometowns of eighteen of the club’s top prospects, as well as five more who were playing in Puerto Rico and Cuba. The final stop of the 10,361-mile journey was Santa Barbara, California, home of Eddie Mathews, the twenty-year-old slugging third baseman. The jet was dubbed the “Rookie Rocket,” and had it departed six months later, an eighteen-year-old Henry Aaron, playing shortstop in Eau Claire, likely would have merited a stop on the tour.
In the end, the 1952 season broke Lou Perini. On April 15, Spahn lost to the Dodgers 3–2 in front of an opening-day crowd of 4,694. On May 14, 1,105 showed up for the Braves-Pirates game. In the final home game of the season against the Dodgers, 8,822 watched Joe Black beat the home team. The final attendance for the season at Braves Field was 281,278, or an average of 3,563 fans per game, an 80 percent drop in attendance from the 1948 World Series team just four seasons earlier.
The Braves arrived in Bradenton as vagabonds. Perini knew the club would not likely return to Boston for the 1953 season, and he began planning his escape. The cover of the 1953 spring press guide had been redone, removing the name Boston. The new guide did not specify a city, reading simply “The Braves.” During the winter of 1952, Perini engaged in a little behind-the-scenes horse trading. He cajoled his fellow owners to relax the tight restrictions on franchise moves by allowing a major-league team to move into the same territory of a minor-league team without permission from the team or its league. The rule allowed Perini to move into Milwaukee, since he already owned the Brewers. Perini then consolidated his power base, buying out all of his minority partners—including two of the original Steam Shovels, Guido Rugo and Joseph Maney—and replacing them with his two brothers, thus eliminating any potential objection within ownership to a move to Wisconsin. Of the owners, Perini was particularly focused on canvassing Phil Wrigley of the Cubs, Ruly Carpenter of the Phillies, and Connie Mack of the Athletics for support, the owners who shared their cities with another club. He was also keeping a watchful eye on St. Louis, where the Cardinals were for sale, knowing a group of Texas businessmen were hot to move the venerable Redbirds to Houston. Perini told his old friend Wrigley that he needed to support the proposal to make it easier to one day have the city of Chicago to himself. When the sale of the Cardinals to beer magnate August Busch was approved, Perini knew he could count on the support of Bill Veeck, who realized the Cardinals were not going to Houston and now had the resources to become a St. Louis institution once again. That confirmed what Veeck long knew: His St. Louis Browns would again be on the move and would need support.
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