Thirteen Years of Magic: The Braves in Milwaukee

On March 18, 1953, the other seven owners of the National League clubs voted unanimously to allow Lou Perini to transfer his Boston Braves to Milwaukee. No franchise had changed cities in 50 years. From the day the team’s train pulled into the Chicago and North Western depot at Milwaukee’s lakefront, baseball mania reigned in Wisconsin. Some so-called experts questioned whether the rubes in the Dairy State could or would support the Braves. Club officials confidently spoke of drawing a million fans the first year. To say that attendance in County Stadium exceeded expectations would be a gross understatement. Despite frequent rainouts that necessitated doubleheaders, the Braves in just 64 dates counted 1,826,397 and established a new National League attendance record.

The novelty and excitement of being in the major leagues certainly accounted in part for the Braves’ success at the turnstiles. So did winning. From the very beginning the Milwaukee Braves were pennant contenders. If not for the existence of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the NL’s equivalent of the New York Yankees in the 1950’s, Milwaukee would have hoisted a championship flag long before it finally did in 1957.

Most of all, however, Milwaukee fell in love with its new ballplayers. A handful of them were veterans on the downhill side of 30. Southpaw hurler Warren Spahn was a perennial all-star on his way to the Hall of Fame. Backup catcher Walker Cooper was an eight-time all-star. Left fielder Sid Gordon was a two-time all-star with power. Rightfielder “Handy Andy” Pafko was a four-time all-star who grew up milking cows on a farm in northwest Wisconsin. Burly Max Surkont was a Polish-American and a favorite of ethnic Milwaukeeans. He fired a three-hit shutout of the Cincinnati Redlegs in the Braves’ first game of 1953. What’s more, he won nine of his first ten decisions in that inaugural season.

Overall, though, the new Milwaukee Braves were a team of youngsters. Twenty-one-year-old third baseman Eddie Mathews, the leading home run hitter in baseball, won over the ladies with his matinee-idol good looks. Rookie centerfielder and speedster Billy Bruton was the National League’s top base-stealer. Feisty shortstop Johnny Logan led the league’s shortstops in fielding percentage. Catcher Del Crandall was a rising star behind the plate. Second baseman Jack Dittmer was a former Big Ten all-conference football standout who complemented Logan as a double-play partner. Powerful first baseman Joe Adcock, obtained from Cincinnati, hit the longest home runs this side of Mickey Mantle. Freshman hurlers Johnny Antonelli and Bob Buhl won 25 games between them and gave promise of winning many more. The Braves were an exciting team to watch.

The Braves’ World Series championship in 1957 provided vindication for their painful collapse the previous year. Fred Haney’s club had blown a five-and-a-half game lead in late July but entered the 1956 season’s final weekend in St. Louis with a half-game advantage over the Dodgers. The Braves had their “Big Three” starting pitchers—Buhl, Spahn, and Burdette—poised to wrap up Milwaukee’s first (of many, it was thought) pennant. The Cardinals sported a losing record that season, but thanks to uncharacteristically heroic efforts from guys like pitcher Herman Wehmeier and center fielder Bobby Del Greco, the Cardinals grabbed the first two games from Milwaukee and dumped the Braves into second place. Wehmeier had lost 20 more games in his career than he had won, but he outdueled Spahn in a 2-1 struggle that lasted 12 innings. Del Greco couldn’t hit a lick, but he made two spectacular defensive plays that robbed Milwaukee batters of extra-base hits. Braves fans were devastated.

Nineteen fifty-seven, the Braves’ fifth season in Milwaukee, saw the team fulfill its manifest destiny. Thanks to the acquisition of All-Star second baseman Red Schoendienst and the sudden emergence of a force named Bob “Hurricane” Hazle, Haney’s troops conquered the National League by eight games. Lew Burdette’s deceptive pitches and indomitable spirit carried the club the rest of the way, defeating Casey Stengel’s vaunted Bronx Bombers three times as the underdogs from the western shore of Lake Michigan snatched the World Series title that Gotham City thought was its birthright.

Milwaukee fans expected that 1958 would bring more of the same. They were nearly correct. The Braves’ offensive production declined a bit, but workhorses Spahn and Burdette won 22 and 20 games, respectively, to lead the club. As in the previous season, the Braves finished first by eight games.

The World Series was another matter. With Spahn winning twice and Burdette once, the Braves took a commanding three-games-to-one lead and seemed invincible. Then, inexplicably, they stopped hitting. New York won three straight, including the final two games in Milwaukee, to lay claim to the title. The Yankees became the first team since the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1925 to come back from a deficit of three games to one and win the Series.

Besides the Braves’ post-season stumble, their 1958 chapter produced something even more ominous. Season attendance at County Stadium declined. The total of 1,971,101 was still the best in the National League, better than any other NL team had ever
recorded and really just one rainout shy of the magic two million mark. Still, it represented a decrease of 11 percent from the high-water mark of 2,215,404 in 1957. If Braves officials were not concerned, they should have been.

The 1959 season was an enigma. General manager John Quinn, the architect of the Braves’ pennants, had quit in January and moved on to Philadelphia. What he left behind, though, looked like a juggernaut. The Braves lineup comprised six starters who had been or would become all-stars, not even counting the Big Three of their mound staff. Baseball’s all-time home run tandem, Eddie Mathews and Henry Aaron, had their biggest season with 85 four-baggers. Aaron batted over .400 well into June and led the majors with a .355 average. The major leagues’ winningest pair of pitchers of the past 100 years, Spahn and Burdette, were in their prime, each winning 21 games. The supporting cast produced solid performances, the only weakness appearing at second base with Schoendienst out with tuberculosis.

Despite an embarrassment of talent, the Braves struggled to keep pace with the league leaders. Only a strong finish, winning 15 of their last 20 ballgames, allowed them to finish in a dead heat with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Their momentum failed to carry over to the regular season extension, however. The Braves knuckled under in the first two games of the best-of-three playoff. Playing in County Stadium in the opener, Haney’s guys appeared listless while receiving no boost from their home surroundings in a 3-2 loss in front of barely 18,000 fans. In their recent heyday, Milwaukee’s beloved Tribe would have drawn that many for batting practice. The next afternoon in the Los Angeles Coliseum marked the coup de grace. The Braves blew a three-run lead in the ninth and bowed to the Dodgers, 6-5, in 12 innings, snuffing out their quest for a third straight pennant.

Recriminations began at once. Manager Fred Haney naturally bore the brunt of the criticism, which continued for a long time. Many years later, baseball pundit and historian Bill James opined that in 1959 “Fred Haney had the worst season of any major league manager in baseball history.”1

Those strong words reinforced what some Braves ballplayers said immediately after the season. Shortstop Johnny Logan bluntly stated, “We should have won by ten games without any question.”2

The feeling was that Haney had relied too heavily on his top two starting pitchers, Spahn and Burdette, to the exclusion of other young but talented hurlers. One of these, former bonus baby Joey Jay, had been relegated to the bullpen in mid-season because Haney thought Jay was lazy and out of condition. Jay did not mince words in assigning blame. “Fred Haney didn’t manage the club,” he told a reporter. “He sat in one corner of the dugout, gulping down pills and saying to Crandall, ‘What should we do, Del?’”3 Haney tendered his resignation five days after the season ended.

To replace Haney the Braves needed to employ a manager whom the ballplayers would respect and the fans would receive favorably. Instead they hired Charlie Dressen. The fun-loving players bridled at Dressen’s egotistical rantings and heavy-handed team management. Baseball historians would tell you Dressen had a brilliant baseball mind. Dressen would have told you that himself. But his personality was a bad fit for the Milwaukee Braves. The fans, meanwhile, found little to warm up to in the five-and-a-half-foot tall master of the pronoun I. The result was predictable—the ballclub failed to win the pennant, and attendance declined another quarter-million.

By the 1961 season the Braves were on a steep down slope. To add to the fans’ disenchantment, the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, who controlled County Stadium, outlawed the longstanding practice of customers bringing in their own beer. In Wisconsin’s blue-collar city of breweries, no single action could have done more to keep people away from the ballpark. Three months later the board rescinded the ban, but the damage had been done. Dressen kept his job through most of the campaign, but on September 2, with the Braves seven games out of first, owner Lou Perini fired him. If that was calculated to mollify the fans, it failed miserably. Dressen’s successor, Braves executive vice-president Birdie Tebbetts, had always rankled Milwaukee’s faithful when he managed the Cincinnati Redlegs. Milwaukee and Cincinnati had numerous bean-ball battles, and Tebbetts repeatedly accused Burdette of throwing spitters. With Tebbetts in charge for the final month the Braves lost more games than they won, and annual attendance fell another 400,000.

Under Tebbetts the 1962 Braves finished fifth in the newly expanded National League and attendance plunged below 800,000. In October Birdie resigned to take the managerial position of the Cleveland Indians. GM John McHale selected yet another skipper who proved unpopular with both the players and the ticket-buying public—Bobby Bragan. The buffoonish Bragan had been fired by the Pittsburgh Pirates after drinking from a carton of orange juice while arguing with the umpires during a game in County Stadium on July 31, 1957. League president Warren Giles fined Bragan and blasted him in a telegram: “Your repeated farcical acts on the field indicate it is not in your nature to take the game on the field seriously.”4 This is the man the Braves hired to manage their club. To Milwaukee fans, Bragan was Dressen with a southern drawl.

On November 16, 1962, the Milwaukee Braves franchise entered its endgame. Lou Perini, apparently weary of the responsibilities of an absentee owner, sold 90 percent of his stock in the Braves to a Chicago syndicate headed by former directors of the Chicago White Sox. Milwaukee civic leaders were at once leery of another out-of-town ownership group. The new owners, however, offered strenuous assurances that they were not seeking to transfer the franchise out of Milwaukee. General manager McHale famously told the community, “The Braves will be in Milwaukee today, tomorrow, next year, and as long as we are welcome.”5

The problem of “foreign” ownership, as well as McHale’s disingenuous remarks, would have been prevented had it not been for a tragic airplane accident on December 17, 1954. Fred Miller, president of the company that brewed Miller High Life (“The champagne of bottled beer”), died that day when his private plane crashed near Milwaukee’s airport. Miller had been an All-American football player at Notre Dame. He was the team’s captain at the time of the legendary “Win one for the Gipper” speech. In the early 1950’s Miller had been Milwaukee’s most civic-minded individual. He led the fundraising for the city’s new Arena, for its repertory theater, and for several of its professional sports teams. He was credited with persuading Perini to relocate his Braves in Milwaukee. What’s more, it was reported that he had a gentlemen’s agreement to purchase the franchise if and when Perini wanted to sell it.

In three years with Bragan as manager, the Braves finished above .500 each season but never climbed higher than fifth place. Beginning about the time of the All-Star break in 1963, rumors surfaced that the Braves were bound for Atlanta. By 1964 there was no doubt. The hot breath of reality told folks in Wisconsin that their baseball team was headed south. The Braves had an ironclad lease on County Stadium for one year longer, however. They tried to buy their way out of the contract, but county officials were in no mood to bargain. As a result, the Braves did something unique in major league history. They played a lame-duck season in 1965.

The Braves still boasted a power-packed lineup. They stayed locked in the pennant race for most of the summer and even captured first place for two days in the latter part of August. Ultimately they collapsed in a heap of pitching dysfunctions, losing six home games in a row to drop out of the race. After that all the action took place in the courtroom of Circuit Judge Elmer Roller. Milwaukee County sued to keep the Braves, claiming a violation of Wisconsin’s antitrust law. Judge Roller rendered a verdict in favor of the county in April 1966, but by that time the Braves were already playing in Atlanta. Subsequently the Wisconsin Supreme Court overruled Judge Roller, and that was that.

The legacy of the Milwaukee Braves’ 13-year life span probably lies in its pioneer role in baseball’s westward migration. Was major league baseball on the West Coast inevitable? Of course. Perhaps the Braves helped speed the process by a few years.

The Milwaukee Braves contributed one other significant thread to the fabric of baseball’s rich history. For Opening Day 1965, with County Stadium now acknowledged as the temporary playground of the Atlanta Braves, an organization calling itself Teams, Inc. purchased the right to sell all of the day’s tickets. The purpose was twofold: to promote the game as a tribute to the still-beloved ballplayers, and to raise funds to help the group attract a new ballclub to move into County Stadium. The day was a success. The season’s largest crowd, 33,874, showed their support, only 483 fewer than the lid-lifter in the happy times of 1953.

The leader of Teams, Inc. was a young automobile salesman named Allan H. (Bud) Selig. From that day forward, Selig was the standard-bearer for Milwaukee big league baseball. He became president and part owner of the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970. Today he stands behind only Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the longest-serving Commissioner of Baseball.

The Milwaukee Braves were unique in American sports history. They never experienced a losing season, yet they existed for only 13 years. Their leaving broke the heart of a city. As the Romans would say, Venerunt, vicerunt, discesserunt. They came, they conquered, they departed.

BOB BUEGE was born the day after Jess Pike hit his only major-league home run, a three-run blast in the Polo Grounds. A SABR member since 1988, Bob is the author of four books, including The Milwaukee Braves: A Baseball Eulogy and Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime.

Sources

Bob Buege, Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime. Milwaukee: Douglas American Sports Publications, 1994.

Bob Buege, The Milwaukee Braves: A Baseball Eulogy. Milwaukee: Douglas American Sports Publications, 1988.

Milwaukee Journal.

Milwaukee Sentinel.

Retrosheet.org

Notes

1 Bill James, Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers from 1870 to Today. New York: Scribner, 1997, 202.

2 Milton Gross, “Logan Says He and Most of Braves Have No Regrets Over Fred Haney’s Departure,” Milwaukee Journal, October 22, 1959, 17.

3 Bob Buege, The Milwaukee Braves: A Baseball Eulogy. Milwaukee: Douglas American Sports Publications, 1988, 225.

4 Cleon Walfoort, “Bragan Sips Expensive Orange, Offers to Pitch It In Ump’s Face,” Milwaukee Journal, August 1, 1957, 13.

5 Red Thisted, “McHale’s Statement Clears Air,” Milwaukee Sentinel, September 24, 1963, 1.