Milwaukee’s Temple of Baseball: A Personal Reflection on Six Decades of County Stadium

In 60-plus years of following what used to be called America’s national pastime, I’ve probably attended close to a thousand major-league sporting events outdoors. With only a few exceptions, the first several hundred of those were played in Milwaukee County Stadium. Most of those were enjoyable but unremarkable contests that have disappeared into the mists of time and the fog of my fading memory. Certain ones have remained fresh, though, and for a variety of reasons, live on, bolstered by baseball-reference.com and retrosheet.org.

My introduction to professional baseball occurred on the playground outside my elementary school around the time of my 7th birthday. A boy I knew only casually gave me a 1953 Bowman baseball card. He had doubles of Carl Furillo, so he gave one to me. I had no idea what it was, but I liked the look of it. It had no words on the front, just a picture of a serious-looking guy holding a bat, and the numbers on the back were gibberish. I knew a little about baseball, but “Bat Ave.” and “Put Outs” and so on were beyond my understanding.

A couple months later, July 5, 1953, to be precise, my dad took me to a doubleheader at County Stadium, the Milwaukee Braves versus the St. Louis Cardinals. By the time the second game ended, I was hooked on baseball, especially the Braves. Everything about the experience intrigued me. I had never seen so many cars or so many people. The playing field had the greenest grass I had ever seen. The pungent odor of cigar smoke was everywhere around us. The overflow crowd created a continuous cacophony, cheering loudly after every pitch.

I don’t remember having a scorecard, so I learned the names of the ballplayers from the public-address announcer. What wonderful names they were. Solly Hemus. Rip Repulski. Enos Slaughter. Eddie Stanky. Andy Pafko. Joe Adcock. Steve Bilko. Peanuts Lowrey. George Crowe. These sounded like cartoon names, and I loved them at once.

My dad tried to explain to me what was going on. He told me to pay special attention to the Cardinals outfielder nearest to our bleacher seats. I never forgot his name, but he did not impress me. His name was Stan Musial. He only got one hit all day. I was more fascinated by the Braves pitcher, Warren Spahn. He kicked his leg so high when he pitched it looked as if he would topple over. He didn’t, though. He hurled a shutout and won the opener, 4-0.

Braves batters hit two home runs in the game. Shortstop Johnny Logan banked one off the left-field foul pole. It fell to the ground near Musial, but the so-called great Cardinal didn’t even run after it. Instead he ambled over and casually picked up the ball and tossed it toward the infield. That made no sense. I tried to ask my dad about it, but the crowd was so loud that conversation was almost out of the question.

The other Milwaukee home run was an enormous blast by Eddie Mathews. The crowd went wild when he hit it, and Eddie immediately became my favorite player, a distinction he retained until his death in 2001.

Two other things puzzled me that day. I noticed that at the end of a half-inning, Mathews and several other players from both teams would leave their gloves on the playing field. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the practice of leaving a player’s glove was permissible until it was abolished before the 1954 season. The other mystery concerned the ending of game two. After eight innings the Braves were losing, 4-1, thanks mainly to a pinch-hit three-run homer by the Cardinals’ Red Schoendienst. The game was called on account of darkness, but it did not seem dark to me. What’s more, the stadium was equipped with lights. Why weren’t they turned on? It would be a long time before I knew about “Sunday blue laws.”

The summer of 1955 was unforgettable. The whole country was obsessed with Davy Crockett. “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee…” was heard everywhere. Three different versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” made the Billboard magazine charts at the same time. Another fad also hit Milwaukee – flagpole sitting. A group of local merchants hired a guy named Bill Sherman to live atop a specially built pole until the Braves won seven games in a row. On July 10 the Braves won their sixth in succession in the first game of a doubleheader. In the nightcap they entered the ninth inning tied, 5-5, before Redlegs outfielder Wally Post slammed a two-run homer that ended the winning streak. The headline in the Milwaukee Journal the next day said “Post Keeps Pole Sitter on Top of Post.”

The loss was disheartening to a 9-year-old diehard Braves fan, but two days later my spirits were lifted when County Stadium hosted baseball’s All-Star Game. My dad obtained two bleacher tickets near the bullpen in right-center. I was thrilled to see in person ballplayers I had only heard or read about, stars like Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle. In the first inning, Mantle’s three-run homer into Perini’s Woods gave the American League a 4-0 lead before NL starter Robin Roberts had retired even one batter. Things got even worse. In the sixth inning Al Kaline ripped a line shot down the third-base line. It struck Eddie Mathews on the left wrist, knocking him out of the game and sending him to the hospital for X-rays.

The National League fought back and sent the game to extra innings. In the top of the 12th Gene Conley struck out the side, earning a huge ovation from his home crowd. Then in the bottom of the inning, the great Stan Musial earned that label with a game-winning home run into the right-field bleachers. My dad was right.

Only one baseball experience could top that All-Star victory; two seasons later it happened. On September 23, 1957, Henry Aaron’s 11th-inning home run off Billy Muffett clinched the National League pennant for the Milwaukee Braves and put them into the World Series. The Braves and Yankees split the first two games in “The House That Ruth Built,” then traveled to County Stadium for Game Three. Casey Stengel’s Bronx Bombers bludgeoned my favorite team, 12-3.

Game Four became a must-win. My dad and I were seated in the left-field bleachers, close to where we had sat my first time in County Stadium. Once again Warren Spahn was on the mound. Home runs by Aaron and Frank Torre had staked Spahnie to a 4-1 lead that he carried into the ninth. He had allowed just six hits and one walk and seemed in total control. After Hank Bauer flied to center to start the ninth, my dad suggested we move down and watch the last two outs from ground level, hoping to make a quick exit and beat some of the traffic. Mantle grounded out to Logan. Spahn got two strikes on Yogi Berra, and 45,804 paid customers sensed imminent victory. In baseball, though, as Yogi famously observed, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” Berra singled to right. When Gil McDougald did the same, fans grew palpably restless. After working Spahn to a full count, Elston Howard belted a long fly to deep left field. It cleared the wire fence and struck a man standing about 15 feet from me. A wild scramble for the ball ensued. The game was tied, 4-4, and we headed back to our spot in the bleachers.

The Braves failed to score in the ninth. Bauer tripled off Spahn, driving home Tony Kubek in the top of the 10th. The mood in the ballpark was tense. Mantle lifted a routine fly to right to retire the side. The stage was set for the most dramatic half-inning in the existence of the Milwaukee Braves.

Nippy Jones, a footnote character if there ever was one, pinch-hit for Spahn to lead off the Braves’ 10th. Without swinging his bat, Jones changed the course of the game and the season. A low-inside offering from Yankees left-hander Tommy Byrne nicked Nippy on the foot as he tried to jump out of the way. Umpire Augie Donatelli ruled that the pitch missed Jones, but an examination of the ball revealed a smudge of shoe polish, so Jones was awarded first base. Felix Mantilla ran for him. Johnny Logan doubled in the tying run. Mathews then smashed a home run that tied the Series at two games apiece. The Braves proceeded to win the world championship. Nippy Jones returned to the Pacific Coast League, never to play in the majors again but forever to be remembered in baseball lore.

November 22, 1963, is a date that nearly everyone remembers. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I was in my dorm at UW-Madison when I heard the news. Someone ran into the corridor and shouted, “Kennedy’s been shot!” Within a half-hour the university canceled all afternoon classes. Soon after that I was on a bus headed for Milwaukee. My travels had nothing to do with the tragic events in Dallas. The Green Bay Packers played three home games in Milwaukee each season. Sunday, November 24, was scheduled to be one of them, and my dad had season tickets for the games in County Stadium.

The Kennedy shooting created a dilemma, not for us but for NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle. Should he or should he not postpone Sunday’s games? On Saturday some college games were played, some not. Harvard and Yale postponed their annual version of “The Game.” Top-10 ranked Nebraska went ahead and played, and defeated, arch-rival Oklahoma. The upstart American Football League called off its four-game schedule. In the end, though, Rozelle ordered that his league’s games go on as scheduled. They did, but CBS did not televise any of them.

On Sunday morning most of the nation watched their TVs in horror as strip-club owner Jack Rubenstein (aka Ruby) stepped out of nowhere and gunned down suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as he was being transferred to a secure lockup. I didn’t see it – my dad and I were in the car on our way to the Packers’ game with the 49ers. At nearly the precise moment of the kickoff, Oswald was pronounced dead in Texas.

The Packers were on top of their game. Quarterback Bart Starr returned to action after missing four games with a hairline fracture of his passing hand. Starr completed 14 of 20 passes, complemented by Jim Taylor’s 119 yards rushing, as the Packers defeated San Francisco convincingly, 28-10. Throughout the game the County Stadium sellout crowd cheered for their team, but there was a somber tone. Perhaps most surprising of all was the fact that the game was completed in just 2 hours and 8 minutes.

Construction magnate Lou Perini apparently lost interest in owning a baseball team sometime in 1962. In November of that year he sold the Braves franchise to a syndicate of Chicago investors. By midseason 1963 rumors were rampant that the Braves were soon to become the Atlanta Braves. Despite repeated lies and denials, the new owners were ready to abscond to the Land of the Boll Weevil by the end of 1964. Only an ironclad lease on County Stadium held the club in Milwaukee for one lame-duck season in 1965.

Like most fans, I felt betrayed by the Braves. We had opened our hearts to them for a decade. The former flood of attendance at County Stadium was reduced to a trickle as people expressed their anger by staying away in droves. As Yogi Berra may or may not have said, if the fans don’t want to come out to the ballpark, no one can stop them. However, on May 20, 1965, more than 19,000 of us (including 1,707 children) could not stop ourselves from returning. The attraction was Warren Spahn.

The high-kicking southpaw had won 356 games as a Brave, 234 of them in a dozen seasons as a Milwaukee Brave. Baseball is a business, though, as we are constantly reminded. After a terrible 1964 season – just six wins and 13 losses – Spahnie was summarily peddled to the Siberia of baseball, the New York Mets. The thought of him starting in County Stadium, probably for the last time, was irresistible to several of my college buddies and me. We found a willing friend with a car and set off on a road trip to Milwaukee.

When Spahn took the mound in the first inning, everyone in the ballpark stood and applauded reverently. It may have been the first standing ovation ever afforded an opposing team’s ballplayer in County Stadium. He wore his familiar number 21 on the back of his jersey, but the words “New York” across his chest looked foreign and seemed wrong. Spahn struck out Eddie Mathews in the first inning. He held the Braves scoreless for four innings before falling apart in the fifth and giving up seven runs. The cruelest blow was a grand slam by Mathews. It was the penalty for trying to sneak a fastball past the Braves slugger.

As Spahn shuffled toward the dugout at the end of the inning, the former ageless lefty, now 44 and looking like it, received one final ovation from the crowd that had come out just to see him. For most of them, and for me, it was the last time we would see the great Spahn pitch. In fact, it was the last time I would see the Milwaukee Braves in County Stadium.

In 1967 Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers were the reigning champions of pro football, having soundly defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in the inaugural Super Bowl on January 15. In order to qualify to play in Super Bowl II, the Packers needed to defeat the Dallas Cowboys on the day of New Year’s Eve in a legendary battle against the elements commonly referred to as the “Ice Bowl.” Eight days before that famous test of survival with Dallas, though, the Packers had to conquer the Los Angeles Rams in the Western Conference Championship Game, played in County Stadium. This was just the second postseason NFL game ever played in Milwaukee, the first having been the 1939 championship game in State Fair Park, in which the Packers dominated the New York Giants, 27-0.

My dad and I sat in our customary seats in County Stadium’s upper grandstand, near the 25-yard line. It was a frigid afternoon, 20 degrees and overcast. George Allen’s Rams presented a stern challenge, having defeated the Packers in the LA Coliseum in Week 13 by a 27-24 margin. Lombardi desperately wanted this game, which would give him a shot at a third straight title. Before the game, he read his team a quote from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians: “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.”

And run they did. Speed-burner Travis Williams scored on a 46-yard dash that tied the score at 7-all, and the Pack never trailed again. Carroll Dale put the Packers ahead with a TD catch for 17 of his 109 yards. Bart Starr completed 17 of 23 passes. The Green Bay blockers neutralized the Rams’ “Fearsome Foursome,” and as St. Paul would have said, the Packers obtained. The Packers ran away with a 28-7 victory. Fans went home cold but happy.

When the Braves fled Milwaukee after the 1965 season, I took it badly. For the next two decades or so, I attended almost as many Packer games as I did baseball games. I was glad that Bud Selig was able to bring big-league ball back to County Stadium, but I felt no particular team loyalty. When I attended games, it was usually to see particular players. For example, on the Fourth of July 1974, I went to the ballpark to see two specific people. One was an 18-year-old rookie; the other was a 69-year-old veteran.

The rookie was Robin Yount, the Brewers’ heralded shortstop. He was batting only .253, a shade above the team average, but for a kid just out of high school, that wasn’t too bad. On this Independence Day, Robin did nothing but impress. In the field he took part in a pair of slick double plays. With the bat he stroked two singles and a double, with two RBIs and three runs scored. The Brewers celebrated the holiday by overwhelming the Cleveland Indians, 15-3.

Twenty minutes after the game, the other person I had come to see made his appearance. German-born high-wire performer Karl Wallenda, founder of the Flying Wallendas, walked a 700-foot-long wire stretched from the opposite corners of the upper grandstand roof. Carrying a long balance pole, the Great Wallenda stopped midway through his walk, made the crowd gasp by performing a headstand, and then dropped a baseball that he pulled from his shirt. Bob Uecker caught the ball. (Four years later Wallenda fell to his death during a walk between hotel towers in Puerto Rico. The only casualty of Wallenda’s 15-minute walk in the sky above County Stadium’s green space was his hat, which blew off after his headstand.)

A month after that, on August 6, I went to see another player of note. The nation’s attention was riveted on President Richard Nixon and his Watergate quagmire. I was eager to see future Hall of Fame right-hander Juan Marichal, making his first start in almost three months following a shoulder injury. He had pitched many times in County Stadium, but it had been almost nine years, back when he was the ace of the San Francisco Giants. He was now a Boston Red Sox hurler in the twilight of his career. I was hoping he had at least one good start left in his 35-year-old arm. I was not disappointed.

Marichal didn’t throw as hard as he used to, but on this night, in the second game of a twi-night doubleheader, he had his old pinpoint control, allowing just two harmless singles and walking nobody in seven shutout innings. The Red Sox swept both games, giving the Brewers seven losses in their last eight games. The Milwaukee players, and especially manager Del Crandall, were booed relentlessly. Two nights later, Richard Nixon announced that he would resign from the presidency.

On Saturday night, October 9, 1982, my wife and I and three other couples went out for dinner at Sally’s Steak House on Milwaukee’s east side. Why would I know that? It’s a long story.

Restaurateur Sally Papia reputedly was affiliated with organized-crime figures. Whatever her connections, she served great food. On a weekend her restaurant was always packed. Of course we had reservations. Even so, we waited more than an hour to be seated. We soon found out the reason – our tables had been given to a dozen or so members of the California Angels. They were in Milwaukee for the American League Championship Series with the Brewers. The teams were tied at two games each. Sunday’s game would decide which of the two clubs went to the World Series. The Angels’ scheduled starting pitcher for the game, Bruce Kison, was seated no more than 10 feet from our table. Other ballplayers we recognized included Reggie Jackson, Bobby Grich, and Don Baylor. We had an excellent meal.

The next afternoon, a half-hour before game time, I said to my wife, “Let’s go to the ballgame.” She has no interest in baseball. She also pointed out that we had no tickets. “You can always get into a ballgame somehow,” I told her confidently. We arrived at game time, bought standing-room tickets, and enjoyed the most tension-filled baseball game I have ever witnessed. The Brewers came from behind and won, 4-3, on Cecil Cooper’s two-run single in the seventh inning. No one who attended that game will ever forget the image of Cooper running to first while gesturing with both hands for his line drive to drop in left field.

Like most sports fans, I want to see history made, even at the expense of the team I root for. On July 31, 1990, more than 55,000 of us history buffs converged on County Stadium hoping to see 43-year-old Nolan Ryan record the 300th victory of his illustrious career. The Brewers were mired in sixth place in the AL East, so the outcome of the game hardly mattered. Milwaukee starter Chris Bosio almost created a conflict of wishes by retiring the first 12 Texas Rangers. Which would you rather witness, a 300th win or a perfect game? Bosio resolved the problem by getting shelled for four runs in the fifth inning.

After that Ryan was in total command. He struck out eight batters and gave up just one earned run before being lifted with two out in the eighth. Texas manager Bobby Valentine received an avalanche of boos and catcalls when he took Ryan out. The Rangers only had a two-run lead, and if Milwaukee scored twice Ryan would not be the pitcher of record. The Rangers hung a six-spot on the Brewer bullpen in the ninth, though, so the night ended happily. Ryan had received a standing ovation as he walked toward the dugout when he was taken out. He received another one when he returned to the field after the game and spent a long time waving his cap at the adoring Milwaukee crowd.

On September 28, 2000, the Cincinnati Reds defeated the Milwaukee Brewers, 8-1. The Brewers managed just two hits, both by catcher Raul Casanova, and gave up 14. It was the final game played in Milwaukee County Stadium, but really it was incidental. Most of the fans – most of us fans – were there to wallow in nostalgia. And we did.

After Mark Loretta grounded to the shortstop to end the game, the three primary radio voices of County Stadium, Bob Uecker, Earl Gillespie, and Merle Harmon, took over. One by one they introduced former Braves, Packers, and Brewers who had performed in County Stadium. As each was announced, he jogged in from deep left field and lined up along the inner portion of the infield. Gillespie introduced Henry Aaron first, then Green Bay Packer Willie Davis. Uecker introduced Rollie Fingers, and Harmon announced Darrell Porter. So it went, 40 of them, each one greeted with a huge round of applause.

Warren Spahn and Bob Buhl, both unable to make the long walk, were driven to the infield in golf carts. Buhl used all his strength to climb the pitcher’s mound. Audrey Kuenn, widow of popular manager Harvey Kuenn, was the lone woman introduced. The last player to be recognized was the most popular Brewer of them all, Robin Yount. “Rockin’ Robin” took a lap around the warning track on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

As the early-autumn darkness gathered around the old ballpark, Bob Uecker stood near the mound and presented the eulogy. The stadium lights were extinguished one bank at a time until Uecker stood in darkness.

“It’s time to say goodbye,” he intoned, addressing the only ballpark I ever really loved. “We will never forget you. … So long, old friend, and goodnight, everybody.”

Fireworks lit the sky as people began to file out to look for their cars. A recording of Frank Sinatra played in the background, singing “There Used to Be a Ballpark Here.”

BOB BUEGE was born 19 days before Reggie Jackson. Buege bears remarkable similarities to Jackson except for being Caucasian, right-handed, slight of build, speaking not a word of Spanish, and having no particular athletic ability. Also, Buege has never argued publicly with Billy Martin and is not a distant cousin of Barry Bonds. Between them, Buege and Jackson hit 563 major-league home runs. A retired educator, Buege has published four books so far, including the definitive historical account of Pine Bluff, Wisconsin. In the baseball realm, he wrote and published The Milwaukee Braves: A Baseball Eulogy (1988) and Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime (1994). His book about Borchert Field, Milwaukee’s primary ballpark from 1888 to 1952, is expected to be published in spring of 2017.