On March 19, 1953, at a meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, the league owners approved Perini’s request to transfer the Boston National League franchise to Milwaukee, while rejecting Veeck, who had accepted the second-place prize of Baltimore. At the time of the approval, the Braves were in the fifth inning, playing in a spring-training game. On the scoreboard in Bradenton, the name for the home team read BOS. By the end, the home team was MIL.
The Braves now belonged to Milwaukee.
The sale was complete, but not without a touch of irony. Five years after Perini had successfully lobbied the owners to ease the relocation process, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, engineered the most famous and polarizing relocation in the history of American professional sports. He had voted for the rules and the relocation, while lamenting that the changes would create a “shifting carnival.”
Still, it galled Perini that he, a native son of Boston, was being forced to move, while that Michigan–South Carolina carpetbagger Yawkey, who would never even purchase a permanent residence in the forty-three years he owned the Red Sox, positioned himself as the guardian of Boston baseball. Yawkey and Boston never warmed to each other until 1967, the single most important year in the baseball history of the city (the Red Sox went to the World Series, losing to St. Louis), when more than a decade of losing was wiped clean by the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox. Before then, Yawkey had been disillusioned with baseball and, more to the point, the city politicians who refused to build him a new stadium with public money. To Johnny Logan, it was just another reason why he felt the gods rained on the Boston Braves. If Mathews, Bruton, and Aaron could have reached the majors together as a unit, it might have been the Red Sox who left town. “With the team we had,52 we would have turned Boston upside down,” Logan said. “If we had stayed, we would have owned that city. I was hoping we could stick just a little longer. But we left.”
Even Perini’s successes were somehow either obscured by or co-opted by the Red Sox. In a city always unable to escape its racial contradictions and confrontations, Perini was never part of Boston’s racially unattractive narrative. The Braves were one of the first teams in baseball to integrate, with center fielder Sam Jethroe winning the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1950, and had the Braves remained, the Boston sports scene would have showcased Henry Aaron and Bill Russell (not to mention a fading but always compelling Ted Williams), both at the height of their powers. It was Perini and his ownership group and not Tom Yawkey or the Red Sox that founded the Jimmy Fund, and yet over the decades the famous charity would become synonymous with the Boston Red Sox.
And it galled him equally that he truly was a man of vision, a person who embraced the future as a place of wide opportunity—indeed, the leagues would expand to California, expand internationally, and embrace television, ideas that Perini supported years before his contemporaries. By comparison, Yawkey would be one of the least dynamic owners in the history of the sport, one who viewed change as something to be suppressed. Following the first transcontinental broadcast of a baseball game in 1951, the common attitude toward television was that televising home games would not be a great advertising tool to attract fans or build a greater following for teams whose fans could not attend a game. Instead, it would negatively affect the home gate. Yawkey refused to broadcast even a third of Boston’s home games at Fenway Park. Perini, meanwhile, broadcast sixty-three of the seventy-seven Braves home games. Yawkey would be the name synonymous with baseball ownership in Boston, while Perini was left ashen and melancholy. “Ever since I got into baseball I have given considerable thought to making it more attractive to the fans and the idea of attracting new fans,” Perini said. “Perhaps several of my ideas were too extreme for some, but they were always motivated in the best interests of the game.” Yet, Perini’s hometown simply would not respond to his baseball team, and it was that curious and fatal apathy that created the momentum toward Milwaukee. Perini saw himself as a man of vision, and men of vision did not fight momentum.
THE BRAVES WERE welcomed to Milwaukee as saviors. In most towns, the bars and restaurants jockeyed to curry favor with the local ball club, everyone wanting to be the official establishment of the home team. Milwaukee was no different.
After home games, Duffy Lewis, the Braves traveling secretary, would call Ray Jackson’s Barbecue and tell the bartender to put some bottles on ice—the players were coming over. Wisconsin Avenue was full of hot spots willing to cater to the team. There was Ray Jackson’s, but there were also Fazio’s and Frenchy’s and the authentic German restaurants Mader’s and Karl Ratzsch’s. There was Mick Lewin’s, and for the best steak in town, there was the Hotel Schroeder.
In most towns, the gratuity stopped there—a steak and a beer and a handshake. In Milwaukee, grateful to finally be big league, the red carpet extended to gasoline (Wisco 99 filled the players’ tanks for free), dry cleaning, and furnishings for the wet bar, courtesy of Fred Miller.
“We got automobiles to drive.53 We got dairy products. We got free gasoline. We got free dry cleaning,” Frank Torre recalled. “A case of beer a week, and a case of whiskey a month, I remember. They just fell in love with the team. I was one of the luckiest players in the world. What a unique era it was.”
The ballpark, County Stadium, was supposed to be a minor-league park, and except for the two-tiered grandstand that made a half-moon behind home plate, this was obvious. Down the lines, the grandstands stopped, replaced by odd single-level bleachers that would have looked more at home at a high-school football field. The light stanchions stood 115 feet in the air beyond the outfield fences, tall and alone, except for a row of fir and spruce trees in left center field planted in 1954, called, oddly enough, “Perini pines.”
The best feature of County Stadium was outside of the park’s grounds. On Mockingbird Hill, beyond the right-field fence, sat the National Soldiers VA Hospital. On game days, the vets could sit outside their rooms and watch the games for free.
The park offered glimpses of the future. It was big and roomy, unencumbered by the funky city blocks and angles that defined the old crackerjacks in Boston and Brooklyn. Hugging the outfield in a crescent beginning at third base and stretching to first was enough parking to satisfy an airport.
The 1953 team responded with immediate success—and magic. On opening day at County Stadium, Billy Bruton beat the Cardinals 3–2, with a tenth-inning home run. Mathews, all of twenty-one years old, hit 47 home runs, scored 110 runs, and drove in 135 to go with a .302 average and a second-place finish for the MVP, behind Roy Campanella. Spahn won twenty-three games, losing only seven. Primarily out of the bull pen, Burdette won fifteen games and saved eight more, while the new acquisition from Cincinnati, twenty-five-year-old Joe Adcock, drove in eighty runs. The club finished a distant second, thirteen games behind the 105-win Dodgers, but a 92-win team was something to embrace. At the gate, Perini led the league in attendance at 1.8 million fans, and the $600,000 loss he took in Boston was turned into a profit of nearly three-quarters of a million. The Boston experience did, however, erode some of Perini’s vision. Once in Milwaukee, Perini retreated from his position that television promoted the game and retrenched, refusing to broadcast a significant number of games to his new and excited fan base.
He had been the first owner to move a franchise in half a century, and it worked. Every sad-sack owner in baseball, either saddled behind a more profitable club in the same city or pessimistic about the lump of mud they called home, suddenly wanted to be just like Lou Perini. That was what men of action did with momentum. They found a way to make it work for them, to cultivate it, to give the world the impression that the happenstance of the day was exactly the lucky break for which they had been searching all along.
THE MILWAUKEE IN which Henry Aaron arrived in 1954 was still growing, though not at the rapid pace it had at the turn of the century. It was adjusting to another transition, one that occurred in the years immediately approaching and following World Wa
r II: the arrival of thousands of southern blacks during the great migration north. The postwar increase in the black population would produce for Milwaukee one of its great contradictions, for despite its reputation for tolerance, high-quality-of-life Milwaukee earned a reputation as one of the most severely segregated cities in the country.
Blacks were marginalized in a tight quarter of the city, nicknamed “Bronzeville,” which was roughly the rectangle bordered by State Street to the south, North Avenue to the north, and Third and Twelfth streets to the east and west, respectively. The name Bronzeville was most likely a descendant of the black section of Chicago, the destination city for so many southern blacks during the great migration. Bronzeville was managed so tightly by the restrictive housing patterns and lending practices of area banks that a study undertaken by the Milwaukee Commission on Human Rights—titled The Housing of Negroes in Milwaukee, 1955—concluded:
The free choice of residence54 in the open housing market which ecologically stratifies most of our population in terms of income, education and occupation is not operative in the case of Negroes. All those restricted within the arbitrary confines of the racial ghetto must find shelter as best they can within its circumscribed bounds. The Negro middle and upper classes, regardless of their education, skills, professional accomplishments—if their skin is dark—must reside in the slum. The fact that they dislike the disorganizing and predatory features as greatly as do their white social status counterparts avails them naught.
Henry and Barbara, who was now pregnant, rented an apartment on Twenty-ninth Street, close to Bill Bruton and Jim Pendleton. Henry was eager to breathe the air of the big leagues—to measure his ability against the top competition in the sport, to absorb the fullness of the dream of being a major-league ballplayer—but navigating his new city outside of the ballpark was a far less attractive challenge. He had always been the boy who wanted to escape, the one most comfortable in his own private space or on the baseball diamond, not easily gregarious by nature. Thus, it wasn’t with great enthusiasm that Henry went about the inevitable but important chore of wading through the idiosyncrasies of his new city, even though he was immediately taken by the nightlife there. Milwaukee was not Chicago, but when it came to hoisting a glass, it was on par with any city. “The first thing I noticed about Milwaukee,”55 Henry would say, “was the number of bars. Milwaukee was definitely a drinking town.”
More than any other player on the Braves, it was Billy Bruton who eased Henry’s transition. “If it weren’t for Bill Bruton,”56 Henry would say, “I don’t know if I would have made it those early years. He was like a big brother and a father to me, all at the same time. He showed me the way.”
Eight years older than Henry, William Haron Bruton was born November 9, 1925, in Panola, Alabama, on the outskirts of Birmingham. Unlike most of his teammates, including Henry, for whom baseball was the only destination, Bruton saw baseball as a vehicle that could provide greater opportunities and acceptance for him off of the field, opportunities not yet existing for blacks. As an adolescent, he moved to Wilmington, Delaware, with the childhood dream of becoming a chemist, but he would later say that he chose baseball because he believed that chemistry was not yet a field in which a person of color could succeed. He had not even begun to think of baseball as a career, because during his youth, the game had still been closed to black players. By the time he had been discovered playing center field for the San Francisco Cubs, a barnstorming club that toured the Midwest, Bruton was twenty-four years old, talented enough to play in the major leagues but too old to be taken seriously as a prospect by a major-league club. After the legendary scout Bill Yancey instructed Bruton to shave four years off of his age to make him more attractive to big-league clubs, the Boston Braves signed Bruton to a minor-league contract to play at Eau Claire. He was a tall and lean left-handed hitter, six feet tall but weighing barely 170 pounds, possessor of blazing speed and sharp defensive instinct. When Bruton was promoted to Denver before joining the Braves, he had been nicknamed “the Ebony Comet” by the local fans.
It was Jackie Robinson who received the attention, but Billy Bruton was one of the many unsung black players who had a special role in the integration of the game. Along with Roy White, he had integrated the Northern League two years before Henry arrived, and, like Henry, he had been welcomed into the home of Susan Hauck. Few players were as committed to challenging the conditions for black players in the game as Bill Bruton. He was as frustrated and impatient for equal opportunity as Robinson, yet he possessed interpersonal skills that made him popular with the overwhelmingly white Milwaukee fans—but not at the price of his dignity—without having to play the caricature of the disarming Negro. He did not raise his voice, or often show flashes of temper, but almost immediately after reaching the big leagues, Billy Bruton had become the de facto ambassador to Braves management for the black players of the team. He would be the first black player on the Braves to live year-round in Milwaukee, and being an older player—he was a twenty-seven-year-old rookie when he made his big-league debut in 1953—he was more mature than the younger players.
Bruton was serious and religious, and he immediately commanded the respect of his peers, even during a humiliating time. His wife, Loretta, did not attend spring-training games, because she refused to sit in segregated seating, apart from the wives of the white players. “There were beaches everywhere in Florida,57 but none where she could go with the other wives,” Bruton once said. “I had to eat in the kitchens of roadside restaurants … or wait for a Negro cab driver to come along and tell me where I could get a meal. All I could ask myself was, ‘How long would I have to suffer such humiliation?’”
Bruton was the black elder of the Braves, and he had immediately taken Henry under his wing. He taught Henry important aspects of the big-league life: how to tip, which cities were particularly difficult for black players, which parts of Milwaukee were friendly and which were not. Duffy Lewis had, in effect, made Bruton his deputy when it came to dealing with the logistics of the separate life black players were required to live. Lewis made Bruton his proxy. It was Bruton who handed out meal money and, most important in spring training, learned the transportation schedules of black cabdrivers and buses, as well as restaurants, barbershops, all of the details black players needed to know, being apart from the rest of the team.
INSIDE THE CLUBHOUSE, the youth of the team served as a major benefit. It meant there would be less sifting through an established, rigid culture. Unlike most clubs that contended for a championship, the 1954 Milwaukee Braves possessed an optimism that stemmed more from talent than experience. The Braves were in gestation, a talented club high on potential but low on actual checks on their big-league résumés. The Rookie Rocket may not have been able to keep the club in Boston, but Perini was correct in his belief that his club was on the verge of becoming a force. Henry was now another addition to the Braves stockpile.
The lone exception was Warren Spahn, who represented the dominant personality of the clubhouse. In 1954, Spahn was thirty-three, eleven years older than Mathews, thirteen years older than Henry. He had been with the organization since before Pearl Harbor, having signed as an amateur free agent with the Boston Bees in 1940. When the Braves were poised to rise to prominence in their new home, Spahn was already the most gifted and prolific left-hander in the game.
He came from Buffalo and was from the outset a star athlete. His father, Edward, pitched in the semipro leagues and city teams in Buffalo and played on and managed traveling teams in Canada. The city teams had no age limits, and Edward Spahn and young Warren played on the same team.
He was, like most superior athletes, always competitive, on and off the field, but perhaps not exactly by choice.
“My grandfather was a shortstop,58 played third base on occasion when the team needed him to,” Warren Spahn’s son, Greg, recalled of his grandfather Edward Spahn. “He was a little, wiry guy. He absolutely loved baseball. He drove my father so much, he alway
s told me he wasn’t going to do to me what his father had done to him. My father was given no other option but to play baseball. Looking back on it, I wish he would have driven me more. It was just an overreaction to what his father had done to him.”
The Last Hero Page 12