Curtain Call - Lacking Bravery

I opened this series with a look back at the final game played by the Seattle Pilots before the franchise up and moved to Milwaukee to become the Brewers beginning in 1970. The “why” for the Pilots departure from Seattle had plenty of potential answers on and off the field, but that’s only half of the equation - it doesn’t answer the “why” of Milwaukee as a destination. In simple terms, Milwaukee was an answer because there was a vacancy: the Pilots were really no different than a hermit crab that couldn’t abide by its current shell and needed to find roomier accommodations. So for this week’s Curtain Call, let’s take a look at the team that left behind the shell into which the newly-christened Brewers would crawl: the Milwaukee Braves.

Before we go any further, I hate saying that team name, I truly truly do. I take great pains to exclusively refer to this club as Atlanta when talking about modern-day baseball, the same way I used to with Cleveland, and I’m going to do my level best to avoid using that offensive term as much as possible in this piece. Unfortunately, due to the nature of a series that looks at teams moving from city to city (often into cities that have also previously hosted a different franchise), it becomes difficult to refer to any one franchise exclusively by their home city. And that goes double for our subjects today, as we can’t begin in Milwaukee. After all, this franchise didn’t - they began instead in Boston.

The Braves are one of the oldest franchises in the majors, having operated continuously since 1876 when they began play as the Boston Reds. They’d cycle through a few names including Reds, Red Stockings, Red Caps, Rustlers, Beaneaters, Bees, Doves, and Nationals for the first 36 years of existence before settling on their more unfortunate nickname at the beginning of the 1912 season (seriously though any of those would have been preferable, honestly the Bees would slap, but I digress). The team was largely pretty bad for the entirety of their time in Beantown - they did capture two World Series titles over a roughly 70-year span, but during that time it was vastly more likely to find them in the bottom half of the then-8-team National League rather than anywhere near contention. 

They did reach the Fall Classic a third time in 1948, and maybe if they’d won against Cleveland (yes, the two worst team names have twice battled it out for a title) they could have stopped the bleeding in their yearly attendance and checkbooks. But when they fell in 6 games to Cleveland and then proceeded to post 4 more middling-at-best seasons culminating with a dismal 64-89 record in ‘52, the writing on the wall came into sharper focus. Owner and president Lou Perini reported to the papers that he and the rest of the ownership group were facing a difficult financial reality.

A moment just to acknowledge how things ended for Boston in that 1952 season. Their very final game was a tie of all things: they and the Brooklyn Dodgers knotted up at 5 runs apiece after 12 innings and that was that. Hall of Guy inductee Lew Burdette was the final man on the mound in Ebbets Field to record an out as a member of the still-Boston-based franchise, but this game came at the end of a six-game season-ending roadtrip. The final time that the home fans, all 8,822 of them, got to witness their team on home turf against those same Brooklyn Dodgers on September 21 of that year. There was no tie this time: Brooklyn used a massive 8th inning to win 8-2, and after that five straight outs brought up catcher Walker Cooper with 2 down in the 9th inning. He swung at the first pitch he saw, flew out to left field, and put the team to rest in Boston. But this isn’t about the Boston Braves, it’s about the Milwaukee iteration, and there wouldn’t have been any move to Milwaukee in the first place if not for that “Greatest [Financial] Loss in Baseball History”.

Based on payroll and revenue estimates at the time, Boston had lost $600,000, equivalent to more than $7 million today when adjusted for inflation, and despite Perini’s insistence that they would stay the course, there was reason to be worried that Boston could soon become just a one-town team. And while there were a number of open markets that had previously hosted major-league teams, two things quickly became apparent: one, if anyone was moving anywhere, it was going to be in Milwaukee; and two, the Braves weren’t the only interested franchise.

The St. Louis Browns were owned at the time by one of the single most eccentric characters in baseball history, Bill Veec. The franchise actually had its origins in Milwaukee as the very first Milwaukee Brewers, and if it wasn’t already starting to get a little incestuous, that was further exacerbated by the fact that the current Milwaukee Brewers (an American Association AAA minor league team) were affiliated with the Boston Braves. So as the calendar flipped from ‘52 to ‘53, the fight raged on as to which of these two teams would get to set up shop in the brand spanking new $5 million stadium with a then-NL-record 36,000 fan capacity. 

Since moving from Milwaukee half a century ago the Browns had become second fiddle to the Cardinals in St. Louis (despite being their landlords at this time), and Veeck was desperate to get back to the city where he’d had his first successes as a pro-team owner. Unfortunately for him, no major league team had changed cities in half a century, when the Baltimore Orioles 2.0 became the New York Highlanders; and in the intervening 50 years, measures had been taken to try and avoid the hectic movement of teams that had plagued the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. As such, any move for Veeck’s Browns would require Boston’s Perini-lead group agreeing to move their minor-league team elsewhere first. And they simply were not having it.

Clifford Randall, quoted in the above piece, was an attorney serving as president of the Greater Milwaukee committee that was tasked with finding a team to fill this stadium that was being described by “veteran baseball men” as “the best ball park in the nation”. The committee and Veeck were ready to compensate Perini’s group with $500,000 for the territorial rights, but the Bostonians’ intransigence led to a shift in strategy for the city. Going forward Randall and his allies worked instead to bring the Braves to Milwaukee, and the first major franchise move in 50 years was announced just two weeks after Veeck’s final overture was denied.

The team was welcomed with all the pomp and circumstance that the city of Milwaukee could muster, and their first season did little to wear out the welcome. The 1953 Braves had a respectable 2nd place 92-62 finish (behind those same Dodgers against whom they’d closed things out in Boston), but more they broke attendance record for the National League withh nearly 2 million butts in seats. The reception of the recent arrivals was so overwhelmingly positive that the following decade would feature a number of franchise moves in what was the most hectic span for the league since that turn of the 20th century. With the owners galvanized by the successful proof of concept for such a large scale change: Veeck’s Browns left for Baltimore to become the Orioles 3.0 in ‘54; the Dodgers and Giants went west to California in ‘58; and the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in ‘55, where they had a long and fruitful tenure and never again had to worry about where they would play their home games.

Those are all stories for other days in this space - for now, let’s turn our attention back to Milwaukee. Milwaukee was, after all, paying a lot of attention to their team: after finishing with an unprecedented 1.8 million in attendance for the inaugural season, they went on to blow past the previously undheard-of 2 million mark in each of the next 4 years. That all culminated with a 1957 season that saw Milwaukee experience its first ever major-league pennant as a city. Seven games later, they had their first World Series to boot after beating the Yankees!

They were unfortunately unable to repeat the following year when they again met the Yankees in a Fall Classic that went the distance; and just as their Boston incarnation’s failure to win in 1948 marked the beginning of the end for their time in Beantown, this 1958 season saw the Milwaukee decline begin in earnest as well. 1959 finished with a tie between them and those same (now Los Angeles) Dodgers, and Milwaukee was unable to win a best-of-three tiebreaker for a potential third straight pennant as their season ended against their old foes yet again. It would be the last time the team ever finished even tied for first while in Wisconsin.

The league had expanded during this period to 10 total teams in both the National and American Leagues; and while Milwaukee could beat up on the new kids on the block in Houston and Queens with the Colt .45s and Mets, they were falling to the back of the pack in terms of actual contention. While Milwaukee never finished below 83 wins from 1960-65, attendance began to fall off of a cliff. 1960 was the first time they’d ever had fewer than 1.5 million fans; by 1962 it was under 1 million for the first time; and by 1965 they fell to a new low with only 555,584 fans, their worst showing since the penultimate Boston season. Even compared to the rest of this decline, ‘65 was bad, and part of that is certainly due to the spectre of it being the end: the fans knew it would be the last season the team would ever play there already. But more than that, they knew that it was only by the grace of a Wisconsin Circuit Judge granting Milwaukee County a court ordered injunction of the team that they were even still playing in the state that year at all.

Lou Perini had divested of the club by this point, and William Bartholomay was the new primary owner of the franchise. Lou Perini had moved the team out here to Milwaukee for a stadium with unprecedented capacity in the National League, but it hadn’t take long for an explosion of dual purpose stadiums shared by MLB teams and members of the increasingly popular NFL that were leaving Milwaukee County Stadium in the dust.

The city of Atlanta, desperate for that legitimacy represented by professional teams that we’ve touched on so often, had just raced through the one-year construction of the 52,000 seat Atlanta Stadium with dreams of it becoming a two-team stadium. There was some flirting with the Philadelphia Phillies and the Kansas City Athletics, but eventually Atlanta connected with Bartholomay, and in keeping with the legacy of his predecessor, he jumped at the opportunity to move into a bigger home. In addition to that parallel, there was no shortage of litigation to try and block the move just as there had been in 1952. On top of that, we even had one recurring character managing to re-emerge in the discourse expressing certainty that this was all going to work out for Milwaukee in the end.

But Bill Veeck was wrong. Bartholomay got his way, and by the time we reach the curtain call for the team, the fans are all too aware that it is the end. They’ve already seen a vision of the future for this team - earlier in the ‘65 season, it was arranged for a series against the Detroit Tigers to be played in Atlanta as a sort preview for the upcoming arrivals. In yet another parallel, the Braves were greeted by throngs of new fans from a city desperate to establish itself on a national stage with a new level of pro-sports prominence, paraded through town as they were in Milwaukee in ‘52 and showered with the kind of fanfare one would probably only otherwise see at this time if the Beatles were coming to town.

Even with roughly 13,000 empty seats at this earliest game, this test run drew on a per game basis what would have been a near-sellout in their “old” home. From a financial standpoint the choice of whether ot not to follow through with this for Bartholomay was obvious, and Milwaukee doesn’t exactly have any kind of moral highground. This is exactly what they’d “done” to Boston just a short time ago, and the city knows that soon this franchise will belong to crowds just as passionate for this team as they are - or at least were once.

I’ve wondered before what kind of solace a fan can find in these final moments, and one potential source that comes up here is the idea that at least their team will still be cared for, and that the Braves will still matter. But without question, this home game is the last they will get to see their Braves specifically. And speaking of their Braves, there’s one more prallel with that last move as we come to the close of their time in Milwaukee.

As they had in 1952, the team hosted their old foes the Dodgers, and if you can believe there is one player who was there to send out the home crowd at Boston one last time that is set to repeat the feat again today: third-baseman Eddie Matthews. In the thirteen years since recording the penultimate out in Boston before Walker Cooper turned out the lights, Eddie Matthews had made twelve All-Star Games and hit 452 homeruns to become one of the unquestioned greatest players in franchise history. He was the “your favorite player’s favorite player” archetype, with the homerun swing seen as so aesthetically perfect that it was featured on the very first cover of Sports Illustrated.

Matthews had spent most of his time in Milwaukee in a constellation of star players, but on the pitching side recent years had finally seen the departures of such stalwarts as World Series MVP Lew Burdette and future Hall of Famer Warren Spahn. Today’s starter is 21 year-old Wade Blasingame, who will never again start as many games as he did this year (36) and is probably most interesting for marrying the daughter of the final Boston Braves batter, Walker Cooper!

She was a Miss America contestant, too! Fucking Wild!

Anyway, Blasingame was spotted an early 6-1 lead, but was chased with 2 outs in the 5th inning after allowing Los Angeles to tie it up. The score remained tied at 6-6 until the Dodgers scored in the top of the 11th to put Milwaukee’s backs against the wall with just 3 outs to go in their final home game. Facing the top of the order, LA’s Bob Miller got a groundout and single both hit to the shortstop to set him up with a man on and one down for the other star Braves slugger, Hank Aaron.

Aaron is, even more than Matthews, the brightest star in this Braves constellation: since joining the team in 1954 he’s made fifteen All-Star Games in twelve season (not a typo) while winning the 1957 MVP award and hitting 398 homeruns to Matthews’s 405 during that specific span. In other words, he is exactly the player the home town fans would want to see down a run in the bottom of the 11th inning with a runner on base and one out. And when the ball leaves his bat, there’s every reason the believe the screaming line drive will at the very least keep the inning going, perhaps even giving costar Matthews his own role in this storybook ending. Unfortunately, Dodger centerfielder Willie Davis is a spectacular fielder - not only does he manage to reel in the seemingly surefire hit, he gets the ball back to first in time to pick off the runner and send the Milwaukee crowd into a stunningly quick end to the game and beginning of their mourning period. And all that the permanent fixture Matthews can do is watch from the dugout.

Much like with their ending in Boston, the team finished the season with a long road trip (10 games this time compared to 6) and also ended the season proper on the road against the Dodgers specifically. The setting was Los Angeles instead of Brooklyn this time, and the final game was ultimately meaningless for both teams thanks to the Dodgers clinching the pennant against their longtime foes the night before. If this already sounds a little pathetic, I hope it’s entertaining to learn that the starter for Milwaukee is Bob Sadowski, one of four members of the Sadowski family to play in the major leagues. Baseball is very dumb.

On October 3, 1965, the Milwaukee Braves stepped onto a baseball field for the final time with nothing to play for but pride, and through 8 inning they seem anything but proud down 3-0 and having only mustered 3 hits all day, but even with two outs in the top of the 9th, there’s hope. They’ve been going through the heart of the order here, and third base in the five spot is up to bat. Finally, after seeing the Dodgers close out his team so many different times in so many different cities, Matthews can try and enact some small measure of revenge for the city he’ll be leaving if not for himself. In other words, it is at least a chance for Eddie Matthews to have his shot, just like his teammate Aaron did, to at the very least be the one to finish things.

Except.

Today, because of the relative pointlessness of the game, manager Bobby Bragan has emptied the bench to play out the string. And today’s starter at third is Miguel de la Hoz. Miguel de la Hoz is very much not a part of that constellation of stars that Milwaukee has had during the team’s time in the midwest. In fact, de la Hoz is such a consummate role player that if you look him up on baseball-reference.com you’ll see his primary position listed as pinch hitter.

Born in Cuba, de la Hoz had made it over to the States as a free agent with Cleveland back in 1958 and only ever started as many as 43 games, his career high, in his rookie year with them in 1960. That made up more than a quarter of the 214 career starts he would have in the decade before hanging up his cleats in 1969 (nice). But, because of the pointlessness of the whole endeavor on this late afternoon in early October, Miguel de la Hoz does indeed get the start at third base to give Matthews a breather. And with two outs and the end of the season staring him down, he gives us all something else: A 3-6-3 putout.

If you‘re not familiar with baseball scoring parlance, you’re hopefully still familiar with where the third and first basemen are typically located. And so if I tell you that 3-6-3 means the first baseman got the ball and threw it to the third baseman - who then promptly threw it back to the first baseman, who recorded the out at first base.

There it is, right there, staring me in the face, but I simply can’t for the life of me conjure up in my head an image of what a 3-6-3 putout looks like. I thought perhaps some insane shift maybe led to them being out of position, but then why on Earth would the first baseman then still be the one covering the base for the actual putout. It absolutely boggles the mind, and a pretty thorough search of every available archived paper in both the Los Angeles and Atlanta area from the day after, October 4, 1965, turns up no better explanation of it. Instead, we are left with this strange inscrutable artifact in the fossil record showing us the end of the now extinct Milwaukee Braves.

De la Hoz is not “Cap’n” Eddie Matthews or “Hammering” Hank Aaron. He would never make the Hall of Fame, or even make a reappearance later in Milwaukee as Aaron did with the Brewers years later. Like many of the Guys we keep finding at the end of these proverbial strings that these soon-to-move teams are so often playing out, he is simply the last man standing. And he leaves us with this last little gift, an unitlligble boxscore, an inscrutable wonder lost to time that we can ponder over or meditate on or forget about immediately after learning of it. But still, as you often find in baseball, it is likely something no one ever saw before, and maybe it’s something we’ll never see again. But those who had stuck around to the close got to see it. Aaron got to watch the end this time from the dugout along with Matthews, the man who spent more time in Braves dugouts than anyone. But they became unimportant in this moment - circumstances have bestowed significance instead on this play and Miguel de la Hoz this time. It’s his time to shine. All the stars can do is watch as the sun sets and night falls on the Milwaukee Braves.