Living the Big-League Dream: The Wisconsin State Semipro Baseball Tournament at Milwaukee County Stadium

What do Robin Yount, Hank Aaron, Paul Molitor, Eddie Mathews, Pat Richter, Jim Daublender, and Chuck Nason all have in common? At first glance, not very much. Yount, Aaron, Molitor, and Mathews all had Hall of Fame baseball careers for the Braves or Brewers. Richter made his name in the NFL, then became the athletic director at the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, during a resurgent period for the university’s major sports programs in the 1990s.  Daublender, from Mosinee, Wisconsin, pitched for the 1942 Green Bay Bluejays and the 1946 Eau Claire Bears when he was not serving overseas during World War II. Meanwhile, Chuck Nason was a standout athlete at Stevens Point High School during the early 1960s before graduating from the University of Wisconsin and ultimately becoming the CEO of a publishing company in his hometown. However, with a little deeper look into the history of baseball in Wisconsin, we see that all of these men had great moments in the sun at “The Stadium” Yount, Aaron, Molitor, and Mathews did it as major leaguers. Richter, Daublender, Nason, and  countless other Wisconsin-born baseball players in the state semipro tournament at County Stadium from 1953 to 1965.

A state tournament was not a new idea in 1953 and neither was the fact that the tournament was held in Milwaukee or had ties to professional baseball. That year marked the 15th edition of the tournament, operated under the auspices of the State Semi-Pro Commission. The best amateur and semipro teams from around the state had competed in tournament play since the mid-1920s. Holding the competition in Milwaukee was nothing new either. Southern Wisconsin is the cradle of the amateur and semipro baseball movement in the state, and many of the game’s greatest proponents were based in and around the Cream City. When various groups attempted to organize a tournament to crown a champion, Milwaukee was a logical location. And in an effort to showcase the tournament to other states, tournament organizers – whether the Association of Wisconsin Baseball Leagues, the editors of the Milwaukee Sentinel, or the board of the Semi-Pro Commission – sought to foster a strong relationship with the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers and then the Milwaukee Braves. The person on the Semi-Pro Commission tasked with building this foundation with the Braves was Richard Sands Falk.

Dick Falk, born in October of 1912 to Harold S. and Eugenia B. Falk, moved in Milwaukee’s high society thanks to the fact that his great-uncle Herman founded the Falk Machinery Corporation of Milwaukee. Dick worked at the Falk Corporation in various capacities until he moved to Arizona in the late 1960s. He was a civic leader who served on various boards and trusts. Falk, who also organized the athletic programs at the Falk Corporation (including its nationally known baseball team), became the head of the Wisconsin State Semi-Pro Baseball Commission in 1941.  According to period accounts, he gained the post after going with the Falk team to the National Baseball Congress Tournament in Wichita, Kansas. While there, he so impressed Ray Dumont, showman extraordinaire and founder of the tournament, that Dumont named him Wisconsin’s NBC commissioner. Falk, a natural showman much like Dumont, spared no expense to make sure that the tournament was the shining star of semipro baseball in the state and the country.

Falk worked with the owners of the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers to make sure the club hosted the tournament at Borchert Field. In 1953, in keeping with the promise that the Wisconsin tournament would “provide the best facilities possible” for its players, he struck a deal with the Milwaukee Braves that would see the state tournament hosted at County Stadium. This truly set the Wisconsin program apart.  Great facilities do not automatically mean great baseball, but for Falk and the rest of the commission, this was not a problem. Every year the tournament was at County Stadium brought great performances on the field.

To qualify for the tournament, a team had to win one of 12 district tournaments or be one of seven qualifiers from the Milwaukee Metro district. To win the tournament, a team had to win four games (or five if they didn’t qualify for a bye) in Milwaukee.

The first season, 1953, saw the Merrill Rangers of the Wisconsin Valley Semi-Pro League win their third straight state title. That year, the team from the Northwoods of Wisconsin defeated Oconomowoc 3-0 in its second-round game (the Rangers had a first-round bye), and the Milwaukee Police Department 3-1 in the third round. The Rangers then pummeled the entry from Racine 13-0 behind a 4-for-6 performance at bat by Jim Daublender. Finally, the Rangers took home the title by pounding the Allen-Bradley factory team 14-4 behind 19 hits, including a 430-foot home run in the first at-bat of the game.

After Merrill’s victory in 1953, the state championship resided in the Milwaukee area much of the next 12 years. The only time that was not the case was when Lew Cornelius, sports editor at the Capital Times in Madison, used his connections with the local sporting scene to field a powerhouse club during the late 1950s and early 1960s. These teams often included University of Wisconsin standouts like Pat Richter, Joe Romary, and Rick Reichardt along with area stars like future University of Iowa head basketball coach Tom Davis from Platteville. Because of this wide talent pool, the Monona Grove Lakers were the toughest team in the state between 1959 and 1964, and won the tournament in 1960 and 1963.

Of course, winning was only part of the experience. The showman in Dick Falk made sure that even if a team was one and done in the tournament its players still had a great time. For the fans, Falk augmented the game schedule with concerts, variety shows, and appearances by Alice in Dairyland, Wisconsin’s equivalent to Miss America. And the appeal for the players beyond a state title?  A big-league atmosphere.

For players at various points of the baseball spectrum the tournament was a place to shine.  For former big leaguer Paul Schramka of the Chicago Cubs, it was a place to keep playing at a high level. Because of Schramka’s hard hitting and superb outfield play, Falk Corporation won four state titles during the County Stadium years. For others, like Chuck Nason, who was a high-school senior in 1961 when he came (along with his double-play partner) to Milwaukee with the Stevens Point Merchants of the Wisconsin Valley Semi-Pro League, it was a chance to live a dream. According to Nason, the two schoolboys were not an integral part of the team. They were vacation fill-ins and were not expected to play much. However, Nason was a huge Braves fan and had been since the team moved to Milwaukee in 1953. Thus, this trip allowed him to go sit in the clubhouse and the dugouts that were inhabited by some of his childhood heroes.

The tournament’s location in Milwaukee afforded players the opportunity to play in front of major-league scouts, who were always on the hunt for talent. According to Roland Hemond, (winner of the Hall of Fame’s Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award winner for his work in scouting and as a general manager), the talent level at the Wisconsin State Tournament was very high and a scout could definitely find a player or two among the teams. Perhaps the most famous of these instances came in 1963 when Rick Reichardt used the tournament as a coming-out party.  Reichardt, who was raised in Stevens Point, was a junior and a two-sport star at the University of Wisconsin. The Capital Times’s Cornelius asked him to play for the Monona Grove Lakers and he quickly became the team’s best offensive player. In the first game of the tournament, he slammed two home runs. The first led off the first inning and landed just over the left-field fence.  In the third Reichardt hit a blast 400-plus feet into the left-field bleachers. Reichardt played a key role in every Laker rally during the tournament. He batted.412 and was named the tournament’s MVP. This performance put him on the radar of numerous scouts including Andy Pafko of the hometown Braves and Nick Kamzic of the California Angels (whose boss was Hemond). The Angels eventually turned Reichardt into the last predraft bonus baby when they signed him the next summer.

Despite the trappings for players and fans alike, the tournament still struggled to draw a crowd at times. This led to more than one outcry in the papers to help Falk at the gate. Eventually, even that did not even help. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee in 1965, the tournament moved too. It carried on in various forms in various locales. However, it never regained the prestige that it had during its years in Milwaukee. It was the golden age of semipro baseball in Wisconsin and County Stadium was Mecca.

LEE KLUCK is a practicing public historian from Central Wisconsin. In this capacity, he has worked on numerous projects for municipalities and private organizations since graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 2007 with an MA in history. Baseball is one of his great passions and he is lucky to have contributed to various SABR projects as well as presenting at the 2013 Spring Training Conference of Nine, a Journal of Baseball History and Culture published by the University of Nebraska Press. When not watching the Brewers or working on a project, he loves to spend time over a good meal with his wife.

 

Sources

The author consulted numerous articles in the Milwaukee Journal and Sentinel, as well as the book The Rangers Reign: A Glimpse of Semi-pro Baseball in the ’50s, by Mike Weckworth and Louis Paetsch (self-published, 2004). He also drew from his own paper, “The War to End All Wars: The Rise of Rick Reichardt and the Birth of Baseball’s Modern Economic Age,” presented at the annual NINE Spring Training Conference in Tempe, Arizona, March 13-16, 2013.

The author also interviewed Pat Richter, Tom Davis, Roland Hemond, Chuck Nason, and Paul Schramka.