After opening the season with the Cincinnati Reds at Crosley Field the day before, the Braves played the first National League game at Milwaukee County Stadium on April 14, 1953 when they took on and beat the St. Louis Cardinals.
Here's a photo that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published on April 16, 1999, on the day of the Brewers' home opener. (I make no claim of ownership. I would link to the photo on jsonline.com if I could find it there.) You don't see many color sports photos from 1953, the year before Sports Illustrated put County Stadium on its inaugural cover:
Here's a shot I found on Flickr. It appears to be a photo of a wall-sized enlargement, with a man in the foreground of the photo looking on from Mockingbird Hill, which sat behind County Stadium's right-field foul pole.Twenty-nine days before their home debut as the Milwaukee Braves, the Braves were still the Boston Braves.
Tired of playing second fiddle
Lou Perini, owner of the Braves and the American Association Milwaukee Brewers, had grown weary of his team being a distant second to the Red Sox in popularity: The Red Sox had drawn more fans than the Braves in every season since 1934, including the Braves' pennant-winning season of 1948. After five straight postwar seasons of drawing more than 940,000, attendance at Braves Field dropped so precipitously that there were only 281,278 paying customers in 1952, an average of 3,653 per game. It's easy to see why Perini looked to Milwaukee, a city which -- through its county government -- had begun in 1949 to build a stadium on spec. No big-league tenant, just a desire to lure one.
After the original Baltimore Orioles moved for the 1903 season and became the New York Highlanders, Major League Baseball consisted of 16 clubs in 10 cities for the next 50 years. The United States fought in two world wars and changed dramatically, but the National and American leagues were unchanged for half a century.
But as the 1950s began, with a stadium under construction, Milwaukee began agitating to join the club. When the House Committee on Monopoly investigated baseball in 1951, Milwaukee Journal sports Editor R.G. Lynch was happy to oblige.
"The major leagues' absolute monopoly of baseball has made the real home town baseball fan almost extinct below the major league level and threatens to destroy the minor leagues, the House committee was told Thursday by R.G. Lynch," the Journal reported on Oct. 18, 1951.
It wasn't just Milwaukeeans touting Milwaukee as a viable major league city. Two days before Lynch's testimony, Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith said "Milwaukee would be a more feasible Major League site than the Pacific Coast or Texas," the United Press reported.
Regarding the just-concluded National League season, climaxed by Bobby Thomson's "The Giants win the pennant!" home run, Lynch testified: "Baseball fans were excited in New York and Brooklyn. And why not? In New York it is 'our' Giants and 'our' Yankees; in Brooklyn it is 'our' Bums. But in Milwaukee it is not 'our' Brewers: the ball club belongs to Boston."
Perini makes his intention clear
But while "Boston" owned the Brewers, within a year the Bostonian in question would be blunt about his westward gaze. On Sept. 22, 1952, the day after the AA Brewers played their final game at wooden Borchert Field -- an 8-7 seventh-game loss to the Kansas City Blues in the AA playoffs -- the headline at the top of the Journal's front sports page was "Braves in red, so Perini eyes Milwaukee." (As the Brewers were being eliminated, the Braves drew just 8,822 to their final home game of the season, an 8-2 loss to the Dodgers, who clinched at least a tie for the pennant with the win.)
In the Associated Press story below the headline, Perini was quoted as saying "There is a new stadium in Milwaukee that is unequaled in baseball. It will, eventually, hold 76,000. It is so located that it is in the center of the north-south and east-west traffic arteries and there will be facilities for parking 10,000 cars. Where can you match that?"
Perini was making his relocation interest crystal-clear, but nearly 61 years removed from his comments that day, it's worth noting that Milwaukee County Stadium was the first of the stadiums built in recognition of the changing nature of American life. The 16 MLB stadiums in 1952 were built near streetcar lines and other public transportation, as that was how a majority of fans had made their way to the ballpark for more than 50 years. County Stadium was built surrounded by a parking lot. Driving to the game, and stadiums surrounded by massive parking lots, have been commonplace for decades, but it was a brand-new idea in the early '50s.
A break from the Cold War
The week of March 14, 1953 had been filled with Cold War headlines in the wake of Soviet ruler Josef Stalin's death on March 5:
"Malenkov Calls for Strength, Talks of Peace at Stalin's Bier"
"Malenkov Sends New Envoy to Peiping in 'Unity' Move"
" 'Sharp' Protest Given Czechs Over Downing of U.S. Plane"
"British Bomber Is Shot Down by Russians at Zone Border"
"Milwaukee May Get Braves; Perini Sets Monday Meeting"
One of these things is not like the others.
The Journal reported on its Friday, March 13 front page that Perini planned to meet on March 16 with Commissioner Ford Frick and National League President Warren Giles to obtain approval for the move to Milwaukee. The next day, Lynch wrote: "The Boston Braves will open the season as Milwaukee's club in the National League provided the other league clubs approve, Louis Perini, president of the club, announced at a press conference Saturday noon in Bradenton, Fla."
Concurrently, Bill Veeck was attempting to move his St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, but on Monday, March 16 the other American League owners turned down his request. The Browns would move to Balitimore in time for the 1954 season. But they did so without Veeck, who sold the team after his request to move was denied.
While the other NL owners pondered Perini's request, Milwaukee trembled with excitement. Milwaukee County Supervisor Ted E. Wedemeyer said on the 17th that "If the Braves come to Milwaukee, it will be the first St. Patrick's Day that a bunch of Milwaukee Dutchmen ever stole anything from the Boston Irishmen."
Reactions and preparations
The announcement came at 1:45 p.m. Milwaukee time on Wednesday, March 18. While Milwaukee and Wisconsin went wild with enthusiasm -- people drove out to the empty stadium throughout March just to look at it -- the immediate reaction to the move by two of New York's leading sportswriters was less than enthusiastic and more in deference to the status quo, as the Journal headline "Bitterness, Sarcasm Employed by Writers on Baseball 'Moves' " attested.
Arthur Daley of the New York Times said: "It does seem ridiculous ... less than a month before the opening of a new season."
Red Smith of the New York Herald-Tribune said: "The sorriest mess that baseball ever managed to create for itself."
A comment that from one of the other boroughs, however, was especially telling:
"You'll see more territories drafted than you ever heard of before."
That was from Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley. Within five years, the Dodgers would move to the other side of the continent.
It's true that there were less than four weeks to prepare. In a move that received considerably less fanfare, the AA Brewers -- who had been scheduled to be County Stadium's first tenants -- hastily became the Toledo Sox. (Max Klinger's beloved Mud Hens had moved to Charleston, W.Va., in the middle of the 1952 season.) The Green Bay Packers were obligated to find a new venue for a preseason game scheduled for the Stadium as the original date was suddenly unavailable.
The train finally arrives
But, suffice to say, Milwaukee was ready to welcome the Braves: When their train arrived at the Milwaukee Road station on April 8, a crowd estimated at 50,000 to 60,000 was there to welcome them. They "tumbled out to jam the square across the street and lined the parade route," the Milwaukee Sentinel's Lou Chapman reported. "The city opened wide its heart to the Major League Baseball newcomers and it throbbed with a rollicking, wild welcome (manager) Charlie Grimm and his Braves will remember for the rest of their lives."
The next day brought the inaugural event at County Stadium, an exhibition game with the Red Sox. Rain cut that game short after just two innings, and wiped out the next day's scheduled exhibition. Then came the season opener in Cincinnati -- the Braves beat the Redlegs 2-0, with Max Surkont throwing a three-hitter and Sid Gordon and Jack Dittmer knocking in one run each.
After that: "Big league baseball! This is the day! A day that will be written indelibly into the record as one of the most important in all Milwaukee and Wisconsin history," the Sentinel's Lloyd Larson wrote in the April 14 editions.
A capacity crowd of 34,357 turned out to see the Braves beat the Cardinals 3-2 in 10 innings. Warren Spahn threw the first official County Stadium pitch to Solly Hemus. Braves first baseman Joe Adcock got the first hit, a single to left in the second inning. Braves center fielder Bill Bruton got the game-winning hit and the first home run in the 10th, a fly ball that eluded right fielder Enos Slaughter only because his elbow struck the low outfield fence in pursuit. Spahn got the win, having gone the distance, giving up just six hits.
Lynch could tell that these weren't the same Braves that had stumbled to a 64-89 record and a seventh-place finish in 1952. "Only the stimulus of a big, enthusiastic home town crowd can lift ballplayers to the heights the Braves reached in that first National League game at the Stadium," Lynch wrote in his column the next day. "The crowd won the players and the players won the crowd. Fans will be flocking to the Stadium all season and they will be rewarded with more brilliant baseball like this."
He was right on both counts. The Braves drew 1,826,397 and led the league in attendance. (They also surpassed the AL-leading Yankees, who drew 1,537,811.) The Braves finished 92-62, three games behind the Dodgers, and would be contenders each year until finally winning the pennant and the World Series in 1957.
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