by Bud Selig
We’d play games behind the school, in the park, wherever. We’d play with any kids who showed up, and if there weren’t a lot of kids that was okay, too. Herb and I or some of our other friends—Shelly Gash, Buzzie Grossman—would play strikeout. I don’t know if it was played everywhere, but it was played in the Midwest. Kirby Puckett told me about playing it in the Robert Taylor Homes housing project where he was raised in Chicago.
We would use chalk to draw a strike zone on the wall at school, and one of us would pitch and the other would hit. It was simple as could be, but that’s always been part of the beauty of baseball. One kid can play; two kids can play. These variations on baseball were great ways to pass the hours. They let us imitate our heroes. I walked the streets of Milwaukee knowing I was going to replace DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle be damned. In truth, I wasn’t the greatest player, but I could run a little bit and I was certainly competitive. As Lew Wolff, one of my college fraternity brothers, remembers it, I’d be the thirteenth person chosen for a nine-man team.
Milwaukee had this sandlot league, the Stars of Yesterday League, that was sort of like Little League or Pony League. I played on the Cuckoo Christensens, named after a former Cincinnati Reds outfielder who late in his career hit over .300 for four years in a row for the Brewers. I played center field but couldn’t exactly hit like Cuckoo, especially not when pitchers started making the ball bend. I was about fourteen the first time I saw a curveball, and that’s when my delusional dreams died. Luckily, by then, I was thoroughly hooked on the game.
One of the experiences that impacted me the most came at Wrigley Field in 1947, before my thirteenth birthday.
Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier on Opening Day that year, when the Boston Braves played the Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The Dodgers were coming to Chicago in May. My parents said I could go as long as I brought a friend, so they put my friend Herbie and me on a train the morning of May 27. An older cousin, Sidney Rolfe, met us at Union Station. He had little interest in sports, but like so many people in my family he humored me, for whatever reason. And that day we watched history being made on the North Side of Chicago.
Even as a boy I knew the impact that could have on American society, how it was going to bring our divided world closer together. Jackie’s debut drew a huge crowd to that great ballpark with its ivy walls and iconic center-field scoreboard. We were lucky to get tickets in the upper deck, as the paid crowd was 46,572, a record, with an estimated twenty thousand congregated outside, near the intersection of Clark and Addison.
I can just about recite the Dodgers’ starting lineup that day from memory. Eddie Stanky led off, followed by Jackie, Pete Reiser, Carl Furillo, Dixie Walker—who was known as the People’s Choice and wasn’t exactly a supporter of Jackie’s, as we learned later—then Cookie Lavagetto, Bruce Edwards, Pee Wee Reese, and the pitcher, Joe Hatten. We cheered just as loudly as anyone up there when No. 42 came to bat in the first inning, facing Johnny Schmitz, a left-hander who had played his high school ball in Wisconsin. He would lead the National League in losses that year, including one to the Dodgers that day.
Jackie took a called third strike the first time up. The Cub fans below us cheered, but there were nothing but groans in the upper deck. It wasn’t a great day for Jackie. He lined one hard to center field but ended the day 0 for 4, without ever getting a chance to show the speed that helped this son of Georgia sharecroppers earn letters in four sports at UCLA. But he was on the field alongside his white peers, no longer assigned to the Negro Leagues, and that was what mattered.
I didn’t want the game to end, but it did, and afterward Sidney returned Herb and me to Union Station, to catch the North Shore train home. None of us would ever forget what we experienced that day. On the ride home, I felt so many emotions—not only was I a little wiser from my time in the upper deck, but I could see plain as day that even though Jackie had gone hitless, he was a great player whose presence was going to change baseball.
Baseball wasn’t everything I did growing up, of course. I’m not completely one-dimensional, although I’d have to plead guilty to being obsessed from an early age. I followed the Packers, too. Everyone in Milwaukee did, I think. They went to the NFL championship game four times in my first ten years under their great coach, Curly Lambeau.
In fact, my father and I were listening to Chicago radio—a game between the Bears and the Chicago Cardinals at Comiskey Park—when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Packers were off that week, waiting to find out if they would go to the championship game or have to play a one-game playoff with George Halas’s Bears, who had given them their one loss during the season, and several of the players were in Chicago watching. It was a Bears game, sure, but it was being followed almost like a Packers game here. That’s when news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was announced. It was shocking, but life in Milwaukee went on almost like normal.
I went to school on Monday, as usual. And on the following Sunday Sid Luckman led the Bears to a 33–14 win over the Packers in maybe the most famous game in their great rivalry. Not a great time for America, and an especially bad one for those of us in Milwaukee. It was hard to study, to focus, but the teachers at Sherman School kept us in line. I never was a problem for any of them. All the teachers knew my mother, so she’d be unhappy if I did anything wrong.
School was always an important part of my life, but I cared a whole lot more about my teams, the Yankees and the Packers in those years, than I did my future. My dad took me to a lot of baseball games in Chicago. Sometimes he’d drop me at Wrigley Field or Comiskey Park in the morning and then join me for the end of the game, after he’d had his meetings with automobile dealer Zollie Frank or someone else. Once we went to a Sunday doubleheader at Comiskey Park to see the White Sox play the Yankees. In the eighth inning of the first game, Joe DiMaggio was up with the bases loaded. The feeling was electric—this was what you came all this way to see. I looked over at my dad and he was reading Time magazine. The second game he was snoozing a little bit. But he was a great sport.
When my mother and I went to games together, she certainly wasn’t reading Time magazine—she was watching the ballgame. In fact, I’ll always thank my mother for one of the greatest trips any mother could ever give her son.
The 1949 baseball season was such a glorious time in American history that David Halberstam would remember it with his bestseller Summer of ’49. In a bit of serendipity, that was the time when the fabulous Marie Huber Selig took me on a six-week trip to the East. We experienced everything New York City had to offer and added an equally memorable side trip to Boston. I turned fifteen that summer, and I have always considered that trip the most magical gift I’ve ever been given. We saw the New York Giants play at the Polo Grounds, the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, and the awe-inspiring Yankees play at Yankee Stadium, which was so majestic it took my breath away. I could barely believe I was there in the House That Ruth Built, where Lou Gehrig gave his famous speech.
I hadn’t been that lucky in Boston. When we were there, my mother wanted to go to places like the Athenaeum and the art museums. She wanted to go to the North End and stroll through the famous graveyards. I had eyes only for Fenway Park, of course.
I was beside myself on June 28. The Yankees were in Boston and DiMaggio was coming back after being sidelined all season with an Achilles injury. The stars were lined up just right with me in town.
But when my mother and I stepped up to the ticket window, the guy there slammed it down.
“Sold out!” he bellowed in his best Boston accent.
“You can’t do that!” my mother told him. “I just brought my boy here from Milwaukee.”
“Sold out!” he repeated.
That was that. This guy could not care less. We never got in and ended up walking around outside Fenway that afternoon. It was a delicious torture. Close enough to feel the excitement, practically to hear the crack of the bat, but no idea what Ted Williams and Joe D. were doing insi
de. Luckily for me, that first trip to Fenway wouldn’t be my last; it remains one of my favorite places to watch a game. (Thirty years later, in 1979, when I owned the Milwaukee Brewers, my mom joined me in Boston for a big series against the Red Sox. Our traveling secretary, Tommy Ferguson, escorted my mother down to the club seats, next to the visiting dugout. When she saw me she said, “Well, this is a little different than in 1949.”)
In New York, we stayed at the Hotel St. Moritz, at 50 Central Park South, on the east side of Sixth Avenue. On July 30, my fifteenth birthday, we had seats in the upper deck at Yankee Stadium, where a White Sox team built around Luke Appling was playing the Yankees. This should have been no contest, but the great thing about a baseball game is you never know what you’re going to see. The White Sox won 9–2 that day, over a Yankee team that featured DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, and Phil Rizzuto. The Yankees’ leadoff hitter, of course, was Snuffy Stirnweiss. Trust me.
But my biggest memory of that day was about my own self-involved naïveté. I looked down on the field before the game and they were rolling a huge birthday cake out. I turned to my mother and said, “You’re embarrassing me!” I really did think the world revolved around me. She just laughed, and pretty soon I realized the cake was for Casey Stengel, who was in his first season as the Yankees’ manager.
I got to know my way around New York well enough that my mother would sometimes let me ride the subway to the game by myself. To see these cathedrals in person—Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, and the Polo Grounds—was magnificent. In those days, you mainly listened to games on the radio. There was a little television here and there—but nothing in color. And here were these grand ballparks, so vivid in their bright colors and wonderful smells.
It was heaven going to all these places I’d read about and seen pictures of but mostly only imagined. It was as overwhelming to see the ballparks as it was to see the ballplayers. And there I was, seeing the great DiMaggio, my favorite player, in gleaming white pinstripes. Little did I know that soon, I’d be able to see games in color a lot closer to home—not just on TV, but in person.
3
ON MARCH 13, 1953, Lou Perini shocked baseball—and me, in a good way—by announcing that he was moving the Boston Braves to Milwaukee, pending approval of the National League. It was a monumental change—both for our city and, ultimately, for me as well.
At the time, I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Eighty miles is about all it is between Milwaukee and Madison. You can drive it in an hour and fifteen minutes now on Interstate 94, but we didn’t complain in the fifties when it took us a little longer, navigating state highways and back roads.
It hadn’t been preordained that I would attend the University of Wisconsin, but it was always where I saw myself continuing my education. My mother had wanted me to go to Michigan, where her niece was going. But there was never a doubt in my mind that I wanted to go to Madison, and in the end it was my call. It was the best decision I ever made.
Leaving Washington High behind and moving on to Madison was a huge development for me, especially in terms of making new friends and learning how to live on my own. I wasn’t yet a complete person. Not even close. It’s that way for most kids, I guess, and it sure was for me. I’d been shy in high school, very shy. Once I went away to school, a lot of that just seemed to leave me. I wasn’t always aggressively outgoing, as I gradually became after I left home. There was a big difference in me between high school and college. I’m not sure why.
I loved Madison from the start. I thought it was the best college town in the country when I was there, and it still seems the same now. Two of my grandchildren earned degrees there, and I returned to teach a history course, Baseball & American Society since WWII. I even have my own office in the Department of History. Madison is one of those vibrant American cities that are home to both a large state school—UW has grown to an enrollment of almost forty thousand, including graduate school—and also the state capital. It’s anything but a sleepy town, as generations of graduates will tell you. The population is a little over 250,000, and it grows when the Badgers play a game at Camp Randall Stadium.
I never missed a Badger football game, and I also went to a lot of basketball games. Boxing, too. You have to be of a certain age to know this, but intercollegiate boxing was once huge. It was big at Wisconsin and a lot of schools. You couldn’t get a seat in the field house when we had a boxing match. It was the death of a Wisconsin student, Charlie Mohr, from injuries suffered in the 1960 NCAA championships, held in our field house, that made school officials rethink the viability of the sport. But I think of it almost as much as football and basketball when I think about my years in college.
When I wasn’t watching sports, I dove into my studies in American history, especially the New Deal, and had my eye on eventually returning for graduate school and then maybe even joining the Wisconsin faculty. I was fascinated with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, both its substance and its politics. FDR and his influential first lady, Eleanor, were giants to me. I think I’ve read every book there is on FDR. He was the first president to use technology—the radio, actually—and it was brilliant. His fireside chats were huge in our household. He was a man of action when America needed decisive leadership, and he wasn’t afraid to tell you what he was thinking. It was a model for so many of us.
I was flourishing in Madison when I got the incredible news that the Boston Braves were relocating to Milwaukee. This was stunning. No major league baseball team had moved to a different city in fifty years. Bill Veeck was making noise about moving the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore but had been denied approval from the American League. Yet here was Perini, setting his sights on my hometown, and on March 13 he received approval from the NL.
A team built around Warren Spahn and kid third baseman Eddie Mathews—already getting MVP votes and barely older than me—would be making its home in Milwaukee, with the opener set for April 14, only a month away. I was beyond thrilled. Just like that, I became a Braves fan overnight. And even better, I could still be a Yankee fan, too, because if they played the Braves it would only be in the World Series.
The World Series! In Milwaukee. Talk about a dream.
There were two reasons this was happening. One was that the popularity of Ted Williams had swung Boston toward the Red Sox and away from the Braves. The other still makes me proud to live in Milwaukee.
Coming out of World War II, a group called the Greater Milwaukee Committee was established to consider the city’s future. It included Edmund Fitzgerald, who was head of Northwestern Mutual and father of Ed Fitzgerald, who would later be my partner with the Brewers—and, no, it’s no coincidence that his name was the same as the one in the famous Lake Superior shipwreck; the ship made famous by Gordon Lightfoot was named after him as a tribute to his family’s history of ship captains—and Irwin Maier, head of the Journal Company. They proposed and the city and county built an art museum, an arena, and a stadium.
Think about this on the stadium: no team had moved since 1902, no expansion had ever taken place, and they had the courage to build County Stadium, with thirty-six thousand seats. That’s vision. That’s courage. Somehow they knew that baseball would grow and change to meet them where they were—and then, suddenly, it did. It was a level of foresight that made a big impression on me.
As it turned out, County Stadium was what prompted Perini to move the Braves to Milwaukee. He wouldn’t have done it if the stadium wasn’t being completed in 1952, when he brought the Braves here to play their Triple-A affiliate, our Brewers. The Braves and Brewers played an exhibition game at Borchert Field on August 18. The minor leaguers beat the big leaguers in that game, but what mattered the most was the impression that was left with Perini.
He was losing money in Boston and felt he could change that by coming to Milwaukee.
In an Associated Press story in September, he telegraphed his intentions.
“There is a new stadium in Milwaukee that is uneq
ualled in baseball,” Perini said. “It is so located that it is in the center of north-south and east-west traffic arteries and there will be facilities for parking 10,000 cars. And where can you match that?”
While Williams enjoyed godlike standing in Boston, the Braves had fallen on hard times after winning a National League pennant in 1948. They had drawn almost 1.5 million fans in ’48, leading the NL in attendance, but stumbled along in the ensuing years, becoming less and less popular with fans. They couldn’t even draw three hundred thousand fans in ’52, when they were 64–89.
Perini was said to be losing five hundred thousand dollars per year in those days. That’s a lot of money in 1950s dollars.
“I don’t intend to (stay) here when people don’t want to see the Braves,” Perini told the Boston Globe after the last game in ’52.
Perini was Boston through and through, from a prominent family. Few Bostonians took his threats to move seriously. But Fred Miller, head of Miller Brewing, and others in Milwaukee were quietly working to point him to County Stadium. It turned out Perini was listening.
My friend Herbie and I were home from college that spring when the news that the Braves were moving hit the airwaves. He and I drove to Story Parkway, the parkway above County Stadium. We just looked at the ballpark, thinking that major league baseball would be played there, and it was like a dream come true. I can still remember standing there looking at County Stadium with all that red brick and envisioning baseball’s future there.
School kept me away from Opening Day, but Herb and I did shoot into town on April 8, when the team was welcomed to Milwaukee after traveling from Florida via train. They played the Red Sox in two exhibition games but before then were celebrated with a parade that ran from the train station to the ballpark.
I was thrilled that Milwaukee had a team. Even better, they turned it around that season, thanks to Mathews, Spahn, Lew Burdette, and others. I went to a lot of games that summer when I got home, but even in Madison I didn’t miss a game on radio. Earl Gillespie and Blaine Walsh were the announcers.