Introduction: Thar’s Joy in Braveland! The 1957 Milwaukee Braves

Few teams in baseball history have captured the hearts of their fans like the Milwaukee Braves of the 1950s. Aaron and Mathews, Spahn and Burdette — those players need no introduction. During the Braves’ 13-year tenure in Milwaukee (1953-1965), they had a winning record every season, won two consecutive NL pennants in 1957-58, lost two more in the final week of the season (1956 and 1959), and set big-league attendance records along the way. This book celebrates the Milwaukee Braves’ historic 1957 World Series championship, its players, manager and coaches, front office, and others involved with the team.

The National League owners’ 8-0 vote on March 18, 1953, to allow the Boston Braves to relocate to Milwaukee signaled a dramatic shift in the demographic alignment of baseball and marked the first franchise move since the Baltimore Orioles moved to New York and became the Highlanders in 1903. In the great westward migration, other teams followed: the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore in 1954, the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City in 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles and New York Giants to San Francisco in 1958. The owners of those teams saw the Braves’ success in Milwaukee, and baseball was never the same.

Critics derided Milwaukee, then as today baseball’s smallest market, as “bush” and argued that a city better known for beer and bowling could never support a major-league team. Fans and players were quick to shed their reputation as a minor-league town whose Brewers attracted just over 195,000 spectators to old Borchert Field in 1952. In their inaugural season in the not-yet-completed County Stadium in 1953, the Braves set a new NL attendance record with 1,826,397 and finished in second place. The seventh-place finish and the paltry attendance figure (281,278) of the previous season in Boston seemed like a distant memory.

The nucleus of the 1957 championship team was already with the team in its first year in Milwaukee. Twenty-three-year-old catcher Del Crandall had returned after a two-year stint in the military; hulking first baseman Joe Adcock had just been acquired from the Cincinnati Reds; fiery 21-year-old third sacker Eddie Mathews was in his second season; 27-year-old fleet-footed center fielder Billy Bruton was a rookie; and another 27-year-old, shortstop Johnny Logan, was a three-year veteran. On the mound, lefty Warren Spahn was “just” 32, Bob Buhl a rookie, and Lew Burdette still primarily a reliever and spot starter. In 1954 the last piece of the puzzle arrived: Henry Aaron, a 19-year-old second baseman for the Class A Jacksonville Braves in 1953. Over the course of the decade, this core of players established the Braves as one of the model teams in baseball. Like the Dodgers and Giants, the Braves embraced integration early, and their success on the field and at the gate can be attributed in no small part to the aggressive signing of African-American and Latino players. Success breeds excitement and the Braves led the NL in attendance every year from 1953 to 1958, setting a major-league attendance record of 2,215,404 in the 1957 championship season.

The 1957 Braves squad was a hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners, ready-to-fight group. After losing two of their final three games and the pennant in 1956, the Braves were determined and battle-tested, yet many prognosticators pegged them for third or even fourth place in 1957. The team was remarkably resilient in the face of adversity. They lost Billy Bruton to a season-ending injury in mid-July, slugger Joe Adcock for 2 1/2 months, and ex-paratrooper Bob Buhl for three tense weeks beginning in mid-August. Teammates stepped up to fill the void, among them hard-hitting outfielder Wes Covington and sure-handed first sacker Frank Torre. And the hitting exploits of a late-season call-up, outfielder Bob “Hurricane” Hazle, are still stuff of legend. General manager John Quinn was willing to take chances, too. The Braves acquired second baseman Red Schoendienst at the trading deadline to fill the team’s one glaring weakness. Warren Spahn, 36 years old but seemingly ageless, kept ticking, led the league in wins, and won his first and only Cy Young Award. But “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron was the key. In his fourth season, he laid claim to the label of Best Player in Baseball by leading the league in home runs and runs batted in (despite batting in the two-hole for almost a third of the season), and won (as unbelievable as it sounds) his only Most Valuable Player Award.

Milwaukee’s victory over the New York Yankees in the 1957 World Series may have been considered an upset by some, but not by the Braves and their fans. Lew Burdette’s third consecutive complete-game victory, a 5-0 masterpiece on the hallowed grounds of Yankee Stadium in Game Seven, ignited pandemonium in Milwaukee, indeed all over Wisconsin.

The title of this SABR Digital Library book, Thar’s Joy in Braveland!, comes from the exuberant headline of the October 7 edition of the Milwaukee Sentinel following Eddie Mathews’s dramatic, game-winning walk-off home run in the tenth inning in Game Four. Those four words still capture almost 60 years later the excitement, thrill, and sheer enthusiasm of the Braves and their fans upon winning the World Series.

If you are lucky enough to remember the Milwaukee Braves’ glorious championship season, recall stories from your family and friends about the time when “David defeated Goliath,” or wish to discover the team for the first time, allow the stories and biographies of this book to transport you back to that magical era.

A lifelong Pirates fan, GREGORY H. WOLF was born in Pittsburgh, but now resides in the Chicagoland area with his wife, Margaret, and daughter, Gabriela. A Professor of German and holder of the Dennis and Jean Bauman endowed chair of the Humanities at North Central College in Naperville, IL, he has published articles on baseball history at The Hardball Times, regularly contributes to SABR projects, including the BioProject, and is currently editing a SABR book on the 1929 Chicago Cubs.