by Bud Selig
While our family wouldn’t always sell Fords, it turned out to be fortunate for me that we represented Ford when I got into the business. In the summer of ’58, I was sent to Ford School in Detroit for six weeks, and there I met Carlos Nelson, a Ford dealer from Puerto Rico. He was a baseball junkie like me and filled my ears with stories from winter ball in San Juan. We stayed at the same hotel and became very good friends. He told me at some point that he’d like to come to Milwaukee and see our dealership on his way home. That way, I could show him my hometown and we could go see the Braves, who were on their way to winning a second pennant and facing a rematch with Mantle and the Yankees in the World Series.
It turned out that Carlos had met a couple of the Braves players during winter ball: Don McMahon, a relief pitcher and a great family man, and Frank Torre, the first baseman who was then one of Milwaukee’s leading bachelors. The four of us went out together when Carlos was in town and became friends. Suddenly I didn’t just have a major league team in my town, I knew some of their players.
Joe Torre, who was eight years younger than Frank, came from Brooklyn to watch his older brother play that summer. He was having such a good time in Milwaukee that he convinced Frank to let him stay when the Braves left for a road trip, and Frank asked me if he could stay with me, Donna, and little Sari. I said sure, and it turned out that Joe was a lot less trouble than Frank would have been. It was the start of a remarkable friendship between me and Joe.
The 1958 World Series also went seven games, like ’57, but this time my old favorite team, the Yankees, prevailed. The Braves jumped to a three-games-to-one lead, but Spahn and Burdette ran out of gas pitching on short rest. They started eleven of the fourteen games in those two Series, which sounds crazy, but it almost got us two parades.
There was almost no competitive balance in those years. The Yankees won the pennant fourteen times in sixteen seasons beginning in 1949, and nine times won the World Series. The New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers had combined to win the National League pennant seven times in eight years before the Braves broke through.
Between the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers, New York teams won twenty-one pennants in a sixteen-year period that’s remembered as the golden age of baseball. Maybe it’s remembered that way because so many of the most influential writers and broadcasters were based in New York, not in cities with lesser teams.
Going head-to-head with the Yankees did a lot for Milwaukee’s self-image. This was a downtime for the Packers, between the reigns of Curly Lambeau and Vince Lombardi, and baseball was king in my city. I wasn’t doing badly for myself, either, in part because I was beginning to do a lot of business with Braves players.
There was a Dodge dealer in town, Wally Rank, who had been getting the Braves’ business from their first year in Milwaukee. He had loaned a car to Del Crandall and then lots of other players, but I figured two could play that game.
Don McMahon and Frank Torre opened a lot of doors. I got to know Henry Aaron and a lot of other players and front office people, and I was happy to help players with cars. It wasn’t even a lease. I just gave them a car to use when they were in Milwaukee. Joe Torre was such a good young catcher that the Braves signed him in 1959 and he was in the big leagues in ’60. He had a Ford convertible, and he liked it so much, he bought it. Henry bought a car from me but says that his buying it from me was so good for my business that I still owe him money. I don’t know about that, but I do know I loved doing business with the Braves. And I loved Henry.
He had grown up in Mobile, Alabama, and was thirteen when Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson. We were about the same age. I was a product of American immigration; he was a product of American integration. We were both becoming proof that all things can be possible, dreams can come true.
When I got to know Henry, I had no idea he would eventually break Babe Ruth’s home run record. But I knew he could really hit (so did anyone else lucky enough to see him up close). I knew he was as wise as he was intelligent. I knew his smile could light up a room.
Henry and I started going to Packers games together after the 1958 season. You didn’t have to go up to Green Bay to see them because they played a couple of games a year at County Stadium. Henry and I developed a pattern that worked for both of us. We’d get together the morning of a game, go to a place called Ace Foods on West Wisconsin Avenue for an early lunch, and then head over to the game.
Thanks to the Braves clubhouse guys, we had passes that got us access to the field. One day we were standing right behind the Packers’ bench during a game against the Rams. There was a lot of fighting going on and the game was going against the Packers. We looked up during the second quarter and here came the young Lombardi, laying into his players as they came off the field. “What the hell is going on around here?” he yelled. He really let them have it. He got so worked up, he broke a clipboard. That was enough for Henry and me to see. We didn’t want him to see us staring at him with our wide eyes. He might’ve made us his next target. So we hustled away from the bench, down to a quieter spot.
Henry would root for his friend Jim Brown whenever Cleveland came to town. I had become friends with Willie Davis, a Green Bay defensive end from Grambling State in Louisiana. He was as big as a meat freezer, but he could really run. Great player. Henry and I would trade barbs the whole game about Willie and Jim Brown whenever the Packers were playing Cleveland.
When the Packers started winning under Lombardi in the early sixties, with superstar players like Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, and Jim Taylor, the Braves very quietly slid into the status of a middle-tier team. The turning point was losing general manager John Quinn to the Phillies after the ’59 season, though Perini did well to recruit one of baseball’s best young executives, John McHale, to replace Quinn.
It’s hard to pin down what the Braves were missing after the back-to-back pennants in ’57 and ’58. Aaron and Mathews remained as dangerous as any combination of hitters in baseball. Crandall was solid behind the plate and guys like Bill Bruton and Joe Adcock were very reliable. Time took a toll on Spahn and Burdette, more than anything else, and the front office couldn’t add any more All-Star arms to complement them.
So the Braves went from first place into the middle of the pack as the NFL became a glamorous league under Pete Rozelle, who was only thirty-three when he stepped in as commissioner, after the death of Bert Bell. The Braves’ attendance went into free fall—from just under two million in ’58 to 1.75 million in ’59, 1.5 million in ’60, 1.1 million in ’61, and all the way down to about 767,000 in ’62. The team wasn’t doing anything to market itself and alienated a lot of fans by not doing more to protest a city ordinance that prohibited fans from bringing their own beer into the park.
It seems like common sense now not to allow fans to bring their own beer into the ballpark, but it was a big deal in Milwaukee in 1961, when the ordinance went into effect. The original Washington Senators had also moved to Minneapolis for the ’61 season, which probably cost the Braves some fans who had been traveling from the western parts of Wisconsin to attend games.
Perini had never been a hands-on owner, remaining in Boston to run his construction business when the team moved to Milwaukee, but he did react after attendance dropped almost 25 percent in 1961. He cut his payroll by selling Frank Thomas and Johnny Antonelli to the expansion Mets, introduced a corny slogan—“Something new in ’62”—and raised ticket prices. He also allowed a limited number of games to be televised, the Braves becoming the last major league team to put its product on television.
When attendance fell again that season, Perini bailed out. He sold the team to a group of Chicago investors led by thirty-four-year-old insurance executive Bill Bartholomay for $5.5 million. There were rumors that Bartholomay’s group bought the team with the idea of moving it to Atlanta, where a municipal stadium was in the works to open in 1964 or ’65. The change of ownership certainly had done nothing to regain the trust of fans who felt they were being taken for gran
ted.
Under both Perini and Bartholomay, the Braves were better on the field than in the community. If you ascribe to the (hopefully) extinct theory that you merely need to open your doors and win, you’ll lose. An owner can never take the fans for granted. An owner must never forget that the fortunes and popularity of a club are fragile. An owner must never forget that people ought to feel appreciated. The Braves made all of these mistakes, and when the wins dwindled, the effects became visible, and eventually insurmountable.
5
UNLIKE A LOT of owners of professional sports teams, I never set out to own a team. At least at the start, all I wanted was to do my part to show the Braves that Milwaukee wanted them to stay right where they were. I had already put my money where my mouth was, but the problem was that I didn’t have a lot of money. I had to borrow to buy two thousand shares of stock at ten dollars a share when Bill Bartholomay, the Braves’ owner, made a limited offering to the public, attempting to broaden the team’s hold on Milwaukee. It was one way that Bartholomay tried to offset the perception that he had just bought the team to move it. No one in Milwaukee was more invested than me in keeping the team here. I didn’t know it at the time, but afterward I found out I was the largest shareholder of public stock. It wasn’t true ownership, but it was the first time I had a financial stake in a team.
Unfortunately, it didn’t help matters much.
On an idyllic September day in 1964, I went to lunch at the Milwaukee Athletic Club with Bill Anderson, who managed County Stadium. We were talking about what locals had talked about every day since 1953, the Braves, but now this wasn’t just about Spahn’s brilliance in attacking hitters’ weaknesses or how Johnny Logan turned the double play. It was about whether we could do anything to stop the team we loved from moving to Atlanta.
A lot of people didn’t want to believe the Braves would leave, but this was a time of great movement in baseball, after the Dodgers and Giants had left New York to go west, and the climate here was bad. It wasn’t just Atlanta, either. There were also whispers that Phoenix and Toronto were trying to get our team. Bartholomay had pursued the White Sox before buying the Braves. But he saw Milwaukee’s limitations, not the spirit that I knew was here.
“We were so happy to finally buy the club,” Bartholomay said. “It was like when you chase the girl, and she finally says yes. You’re just so happy. Now, once we had the club, you stop and look around and see that the American League had just moved the Washington Senators to Minnesota. So we have the Twins in the west, a lake to the east, a border to the north and two clubs in Chicago to the south. Any way you sliced it, it was a small and finite market.”
People talk about quality of life, and I’m a big believer that baseball adds to that for a city. But for me baseball hasn’t ever been about quality of life; it’s been the essence of my life. All around America, major league teams were popping up in new places. The Dodgers and Giants moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. Texas got its first team with the expansion Colt .45s in Houston. The American League awarded an expansion team to Southern California—the Angels—to keep up with the Dodgers. Even Washington, D.C., got an expansion version of the Senators after Calvin Griffith turned the original Senators into the Twins.
I wanted to make a difference but couldn’t do it on my own. The key, I knew, was to get some of Milwaukee’s business leaders involved. And that day at the Athletic Club I had the good fortune to have lunch at the same time as Bob Uihlein.
He was the president of Schlitz Brewing Company, one of the biggest businesses in the city, and his family controlled the two biggest banks in the state, M&I and First Wisconsin. He was a Harvard grad who had picked up a law degree at the University of Wisconsin, and was known around town as a legendary polo player. I certainly knew who he was, even if he didn’t know me.
I had been talking to Anderson about how Milwaukee needed to get a group together to save the Braves and Uihlein was someone who could actually help. Anderson knew Uihlein and approached him. He told him that I was the fellow who was trying to keep baseball in Milwaukee and asked if he had time to meet with me.
“It’s quarter to one,” Uihlein said. “How’s one thirty?”
Anderson came back to our table and asked me what I was doing after lunch. I told him I was going back to work, but he shook his head. “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re going to see Mr. Uihlein at the brewery.”
In forty-five minutes? I’m having the most important meeting in my life and I’ve got forty-five minutes to prepare for it?
That’s crazy, even for me. But I was thrilled that I was getting time with Uihlein, so now it was a matter of making the most of it.
My mind was going a mile a second as I drove my Ford sedan toward Schlitz’s headquarters, in a huge building in the heart of the city that I’d passed a thousand times but never been in. I had to make the most of this chance. I had to convince him that there’s something special, something sacred even, about the relationship of a city and its baseball team.
Once his secretary showed me in, I was struck by how Uihlein carried himself. He was this big, tall man but he made me feel comfortable immediately.
He knew what I wanted to talk about but at the start didn’t share my concern.
“Our people don’t think the Braves are leaving,” he said.
“Mr. Uihlein,” I said, “they’re leaving.”
I poured my heart out to him, passing along what I’d picked up from being around Bartholomay, Anderson, and even the team’s players, including Aaron and Mathews. They knew the situation was dire, and that’s what I worked to get across to Uihlein.
After about an hour, he was sold.
Uihlein said he would help if I could put together a group that would buy the team to keep it in Milwaukee. He walked around his desk, stuck out his big hand, and said, “Well, partner, we’re in.”
When I walked out of the Schlitz headquarters, I was stunned, almost speechless. I was also happier than I’d been in a long time. Maybe this could work. Our Braves were leaving, which was heartbreaking, but something else was happening and I was right in the middle of it. Here I was, on the verge of devoting my life to baseball, and it felt like what I was supposed to be doing.
In that first meeting, Uihlein had told me we needed a lawyer and a banker in our group. He had recommendations—a lawyer named Richard Cutler and a banker named George Kasten. I went to see both of them that afternoon and they enthusiastically jumped aboard.
Kasten was a gentle man and a people person who had been educated at Williams College. He was chairman of First Wisconsin, and he loved Milwaukee the way I did. He was waiting for me on the street after Uihlein called to tell him I was coming over to meet him. It was the first time a bank chairman was happy to see me.
I remember being really proud of myself when that day ended. When I told my dad that I had met with Bob Uihlein and George Kasten, he couldn’t believe it.
With Uihlein’s support and our new line of credit, I decided to go for it. Bob and I wrote a letter to Bartholomay, offering him seven million dollars for the team.
In our eyes, that could have been a classic win-win situation. The Braves’ new owners would earn a tidy profit for their short time in baseball and we’d have local ownership of the team, determined to ride through the tough times that the franchise was facing. But we were naïve to think they’d sell us the team when there were so many other cities talking to Bartholomay about relocation.
We got a one-line response to our proposal, and it was a polite rejection. “Thank you for your interest in the Milwaukee Braves,” it read, but that was only the start for us.
We recruited another of Milwaukee’s civic leaders, Ed Fitzgerald. He was the head of Cutler-Hammer, an electrical manufacturing giant. His father was Edmund Fitzgerald, who had been active on the civic commission that got County Stadium built. Ed would become an invaluable friend and partner. A coalition was forming, and it would become a tight group
.
Ed’s sister, Liz, was married to our lawyer, Dick Cutler. He had graduated from both Yale and Yale Law and was a managing partner at one of Milwaukee’s most prominent law firms, Quarles & Brady.
We also reached out to Ben Barkin, a brilliant advertising and public relations man. He was like Uihlein. He knew everybody in town and from the start he grasped both our vision and the urgency of our actions.
We decided to give our organization a name. Ben came up with “Teams Inc.,” which was an acronym for “To Encourage All Milwaukee Sports.” This had become a second full-time job for me, and I was already following my father’s example by working long days and nights.
I might have been working alongside him, but my father didn’t really understand what I was doing. Because my mother loved baseball the same way I did, she got it, but she was worried about me. Donna and I had two daughters now, as Wendy was chasing Sari around the house. She was born March 18, 1960, and was a ball of fire from the start. She would become my baseball girl. Eventually my mother made me start taking Wednesday night off, so I could have one family night in the middle of the week.
I had gone to New York myself in October, a month after Uihlein and I got the ball rolling. I sent myself to the World Series—Cardinals–Yankees—to represent our group.
While I was there I managed to visit Commissioner Ford Frick in his office. I cold-called him, of course, and he must have felt our conversation would be harmless.
I was nervous riding up the elevator, scared. Here I was, just a kid, and he was the commissioner of baseball. I was surprised he was seeing me, to be honest, but I told him how much I loved baseball and how worried I was about the Braves leaving Milwaukee. He was actually very nice to me. Really nice. He thanked me for coming in. I wasn’t there long, but I left feeling good. He said he understood why I was unhappy and wished me well. That was something, even if it didn’t mean anything.