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Leave a Comment Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. World Series Winner Relocate To Atlanta. Lou Perini sold the Braves to a Chicago-based group led by William Bartholomay after the season and the ink was barely dry on the deal when Bartholomay started shopping the Braves to a larger television market.
Braves Primary Logo. Braves Alternate Logo. Sports History. Baseball History. On January 23, , the litigation over the Braves departure finally came to an end when the Court simply announced that the rehearing petition had been denied and that Justice Fortas had not participated in the review. Thus, by late January it was clear that the city of Milwaukee would be without major league baseball for When the National League announced in November , that it would be adding two additional teams for the season, Milwaukee applied for one of the franchises, as did groups from Dallas-Ft.
However, when the two new franchises were awarded in May of , the National League ignored Milwaukee and awarded teams to San Diego and Montreal. As a result, except for 20 Chicago White Sox games played in County Stadium in and , Milwaukee remained without Major League Baseball until , when Bud Selig and his associates bought the bankrupt Seattle Pilots shortly before Opening Day and moved the one year old team to Milwaukee, where they were renamed the Brewers.
After relocating to Milwaukee in from Boston, where the team had played since , the Braves were for the rest of the decade one of the showpiece franchises of all of baseball.
In a decade in which attendance at major league baseball games steadily eroded, the Braves set one National League attendance record after another. Not only was it based in a larger and still rapidly growing metropolitan area, but it was also located in an area the Southeast without Major League Baseball.
However, after the wave of team relocations between and , Major League owners had become clearly reluctant to permit additional teams to change cities in search of greater revenues, particularly if it would leave the vacated city without a team.
Worth, Atlanta, Louisville, and Oakland had been regularly rebuffed in the years between and It was highly unlikely that the other owners would have approved the Braves relocation to Atlanta in , had the only reason to move been a desire to make greater profits. The totals for , , and represented new National League attendance records. The reasons for the fall off in attendance after are complicated, especially given the fact that the team had a winning record during each of the thirteen seasons that it played in Milwaukee.
Fan exhaustion may have been a factor. Of course, not all of those who attended Braves game came from the Milwaukee area. The team, in fact, regularly drew fans from throughout the state of Wisconsin, and the establishment of the Twin Cities-based Minnesota Twins may have cost the team fans from the western and central part of the state. The Twins drew 1. By one measure, the Milwaukee Braves were the most consistently successful team in major league baseball history, finishing, as already mentioned, with winning records in each of their 13 seasons in Milwaukee.
On the other hand, the Braves were significantly more successful relative to their competition in their first eight seasons than in their last five. After finishing second in the National League in and third in , the Braves went on a remarkable run. In and , they finished second behind the Brooklyn Dodgers, and by only one game in the latter year. They then won National League championships in and and the World Series in , and then finished in a tie for first place in with the now Los Angeles Dodgers.
Unfortunately, they lost the play-off series, and thus missed a third straight World Series. In , the Braves were in first place as late as July 24, but a record over the remainder of the season left them in second place, seven games behind the surprising Pittsburgh Pirates. Accordingly, attendance at Braves games began to decline noticeably in August and September , especially once it became clear that the Braves were not likely to catch the first place Pirates.
Although most Braves fans expected Milwaukee to return to the top of the National League in , the team finished a disappointing fourth, its lowest finish since arriving from Boston in Once again, the decline was not as steep as the standings suggested. Offensively, the Braves scored runs, compared to in , and the number of runs allowed by Brave pitchers actually improved ever so slightly from to The situation appeared even worse in subsequent years as the Braves finished fifth, sixth, fifth, and fifth again in their final four years in Milwaukee even while each year winning between 84 and 88 games in a game season.
Attendance plummeted steadily throughout the period even though the team was usually in the pennant chase for the better part of the season. Accustomed to having a team at the top of the standings, Milwaukeeans seemed much less interested in a team in the middle of the pack, even if the team had a winning record and continued to feature star players like Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Warren Spahn through , and Joe Torre.
When necessary, the Braves were willing to take on the contracts of established players to fortify the line-up. Perhaps the least significant personnel move of the era was the decision to promote minor league catcher and Milwaukee native Bob Uecker to the major league team in Louis Cardinals of that era. The Giants, in contrast, relied on power rather than speed, with a line-up that featured Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, who combined for home runs between and including by Mays alone , and by the three Alou Brothers, and by pitcher Juan Marichal.
The Reds of this era featured Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, and Pete Rose, and a pitching staff that produced six game winners between and The Cardinals who finished the five year period from to with a combined record seven games better than Braves included players like the aging Stan Musial and younger stars of the caliber of Ken Boyer, Bill White, Dick Groat, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and the incomparable Bob Gibson. Moreover, in spite of never finishing lower than second place between and , the Indians saw their attendance further decline from 1.
Although the Milwaukee Braves season was hardly a failure in terms of either on the field performance or attendance, it was the first year since arriving from Boston that the team failed to turn a profit.
The decision to shore up the team with veterans like Roy McMillan, Frank Bolling, Frank Thomas, and Johnny Antonelli , acquired before or during the season, had greatly inflated the team payroll, but obviously did not lead to a rebound in attendance. Some observers attributed the decline in attendance to a new city ordinance that took effect for the season which prohibited fans from bringing their own beer into the park.
Although a number of contemporary newspaper stories report how unpopular this ordinance was with Braves fans, it is hard to believe that this explains the decline in attendance. Another explanation for the decline in attendance in was the appearance in the upper Midwest of the transplanted Washington Senators, now playing as the Minnesota Twins.
The Twins did draw a million and a half fans in their inaugural season, but, again, it is hard to believe that competition from the Twins explains the substantial drop in attendance, any more than does the new restrictions on bringing beer into County Stadium.
This sudden decline in profitability led owner Lou Perini to make a number of changes after the season. To cut his payroll, the team sold the contracts of recent acquisitions Frank Thomas and Johnny Antonelli to the expansion New York Mets. Antonelli was washed up and never pitched again, but Thomas hit 34 homeruns for the Mets the following year. Perini also raised ticket prices as he had before the season and for the first time agreed to permit the broadcast of a limited number of Braves games on television.
In , the Braves were the only major league baseball team that did not allow any of its games to be televised into its home market, but in , Perini permitted the broadcast of fifteen road games on local television. He also made plans to install an escalator at County Stadium to make it easier for fans to reach the upper deck.
You knew baseball had enough connections in high places to do what they wanted. Allan H. But the league awarded San Diego and Montreal expansion franchises instead of Milwaukee in A deal to land the Chicago White Sox fell through in Milwaukee baseball fans were grateful, but after 13 winning seasons rooting for the Braves, Brewers fans had to endure eight losing seasons before Milwaukee had a winning team, then another three years without making the playoffs.
But eventually, the Brewers became a Milwaukee staple and the Braves, for all their pomp and circumstance, became somewhat forgotten. Allen was on the call in , but games were not broadcast in Milwaukee thereafter. JR Radcliffe can be reached at or jradcliffe gannett. Follow him on Twitter at JRRadcliffe.
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Now, the franchise will face the Brewers in the playoffs.
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