The Milwaukee Brewers at 50

career.

INTRODUCTION

BY BUD SELIG

Ihave always believed and often stated that baseball is the greatest game ever invented. I have been a devoted and avid fan for as long as I can remember. Baseball was the language spoken in the house I was raised. We were a family of baseball fanatics, especially my mother, Marie, and me. I was only three years old when she first began taking me to Borchert Field to watch the original Milwaukee Brewers play Triple A ball in the American Association.

My passion for the game never subsided. Growing up, I dreamed of becoming the next Joe DiMaggio, my favorite player. That dream, however, came to an abrupt end when I discovered I could not hit a curveball. But that didn’t end my dream of someday living a baseball life.

I had no idea how that would possibly occur, yet somehow it did, and I have spent almost my entire adult life in Major League Baseball, first as the owner of the Brewers and then as the leader of Major League Baseball, beginning in September 1992 as the interim commissioner and then as the ninth commissioner, from July 1998 through January 2015.

It has been an extraordinary experience. Although there have been difficult times, especially while I was commissioner, I believe the game has accomplished a great deal during my tenure. I am especially proud of the role I played in the building of Miller Park, as well as reforming the game’s economic structure, securing labor peace for more than two decades, which is still ongoing; and achieving greater competitive balance, the best drug-testing program in American sports, the wild-card, interleague play, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, MLB.TV, and overall economic prosperity.

But, perhaps, my greatest achievement was bringing Major League Baseball back to Milwaukee. This formidable task began to unfold in 1964 when the Braves announced they would move to Atlanta, which they did after the 1965 season, and wasn’t completed until a week before the start of the 1970 season.

The Braves leaving Milwaukee was a great blow, not only to me but to every baseball fan in our city and state. It became my mission, not to someday own a major league club, only to do my part in somehow bringing Major League Baseball back to Milwaukee. It was an ordeal and it took more than five years. I am sure many major league club owners got tired of my presence at their meetings through the latter half of the 1960s. Yet it was imperative for me to appeal to them on behalf of our community. There were times I thought we would win an expansion franchise, but it was not to be. I thought we had a shot at purchasing the Chicago White Sox, but that was not to be, as well. Our last hope was the fate of the Seattle Pilots, who were going through bankruptcy following their first season as an expansion franchise. With only a week to go before the beginning of the 1970 season, the bankruptcy judge awarded us the Seattle club. Finally, our great city was back in the big leagues.

I am grateful to and appreciate the work that Adam McCalvy has done in authoring this book. He has brought back memories for all of us in describing five wonderful decades of Brewers baseball. It has been a magnificent run. My 50-year relationship with the Milwaukee Brewers has meant so much to me and allowed me to form meaningful lifelong relationships with such wonderful people as Hank Aaron, Bob Uecker, Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, and Mark Attanasio, along with so many others.

INTRODUCTION

BY MARK ATTANASIO

Many of my earliest memories center around my love for baseball. As an elementary school student in the Bronx, I saved my allowance to buy Topps baseball cards and ripped open each 5¢ wax pack hoping for Yankees. Fortunately, I still have all my cards in shoe boxes!

After the Yankees lost the World Series to the Cardinals in 1964, I walked around my block crying, but thinking they would win next year. Little did I know Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and my other heroes would age over the winter and next year wouldn’t come until 1976, when I was a college sophomore. I failed an exam that fall because I’d decided to celebrate the Yankees beating the Royals to go to the World Series. In 2000, my wife, Debbie, and I took our two California-born-and-bred sons to the Bronx to see the Yankees-Mets Subway Series—on the subway! The following year, I was at Game 7 of the World Series when the Yankees played in Arizona. To my shock, the Diamondbacks—down by a run in the bottom of the ninth inning—scratched across two runs with a key plate appearance from a player named Craig Counsell. And in 2003, I was in Yankee Stadium when Pedro Martinez couldn’t get out of the eighth inning with the Red Sox five outs away from making it to the World Series.

I had no idea the dramatic turn my life and baseball passions were about to take. But you will have to read on for that story—it’s one of the many told in this book.

When Wendy Selig-Prieb called and told me that I would be the next owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, I let out a scream—and, just as I did when my sons were born, I immediately fell in love. From that moment, my heart belonged to the Brewers and no other team. I began by focusing on what I was—a fan—and did what any fan would do if given the chance. After speaking with Commissioner Selig, I called Bob Uecker and Robin Yount, beginning friendships that span 15 years and counting. I also made sure I reserved seats next to the dugout because I wanted to be with the fans, as close as possible to the players, instead of sitting in a private suite.

Owning the team has been a remarkable experience for me and my family. I was blessed to hear my father sing the National Anthem on every Opening Day at Miller Park (and on every home opener during a playoff series) for 10 years, and to have my sons, Dan and Mike, take over that role from their grandfather after he passed away. The team has brought my extended family together at spring training, Opening Day, on the road, and best of all, during the playoffs.

In 2008, just as we were about to earn a playoff berth for the first time in 26 years, a Milwaukee police officer came down the aisle and stood next to me as the fans’ cheers became deafening. Over the roar, I heard him crying. He told me that he had been at the clinching game in 1982 with his dad who had since passed away, and he had thought he would never see the Brewers in the playoffs again. I travel all over the country watching professional sports, but I rarely see a bond between a community and a team like the people of Milwaukee and Wisconsin have with the Brewers.

Thanks to Adam McCalvy, who took on the enormous task of authoring this book and bringing to life 50 years of Brewers baseball. I have been privileged to assume the stewardship of this wonderful franchise in this special community. Furthermore, I have had the benefit of having baseball’s most accomplished commissioner as my mentor and my good friend.

Go Brewers!

The 1970s

  CELEBRATING A HALF-CENTURY OF BREWERS BASEBALL

BASEBALL RETURNS TO MILWAUKEE

When the call came at 10:15 PM on March 31, 1970, Milwaukee County Stadium sat dark and empty down in the Menomonee Valley, a cold reminder of Major League Baseball’s bitter departure five years earlier.

There were no uniforms. No baseballs, bats, or helmets.

No peanuts or Cracker Jack or cold beer.

No ushers. No vendors. No broadcasters.

No whispers of the stories that would be told there in the decades that followed. Of Robin Yount and Paul Molitor and Rollie Fingers. The return of Henry Aaron. Bambi’s Bombers and Harvey’s Wallbangers and Team Streak. Geoff Jenkins and Jeff Cirillo and the rise of Miller Park. Of Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun. Christian Yelich and a hometown kid named Craig Counsell.

When Bud Selig picked up the telephone at his Fox Point home that night, he heard three words from Milwaukee Sentinel sports editor Lloyd Larson that changed the course of the next 50 years and counting:

You got it.

With that, Larson slammed down the telephone and chased deadline.

The Milwaukee Brewers were born.

A telegram the next day confirmed it. Selig had one week to put everything in place for a major league game.

It had been five and a half years of disappointment after disappointment, Selig said. "I remember that night I took a walk, thinking, Who would have dreamed after all these years of wanting to own a Major League Baseball team, and now we do? Wow."

The office of the commissioner emeritus of Major League Baseball is on the top floor of a 14-story modern glass building that stands one long toss from Milwaukee’s lakefront. It is as much museum as office, which is fitting for a man who might have become a history professor had the outcome of that late-night telephone call been different.

On his cluttered desk sits a small nameplate. It reads, ILLEGITIMUS NON CARBORUNDUM, a mock-Latin aphorism that translates to a phrase not exactly fit for family reading.

Let’s just say it loosely means, Don’t let ’em get you down.

That little plaque, as much as any of the memorabilia around it, tells the story of Allan Huber Bud Selig, the ninth commissioner of baseball, founder of the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club, and, before all that, a baseball-crazed boy who inherited an infection for the sport from his mother, Marie. In that, Selig shares a trait with longtime friend Bob Uecker.

Baseball would win Selig’s heart and then break it. He fell in love at Borchert Field, home of the old minor league Milwaukee Brewers, and was overjoyed when the Boston Braves moved to newly constructed County Stadium in 1953. Major League Baseball had arrived, and the Milwaukee Braves were good. They were the first National League franchise to draw 2 million fans. By 1957 they were one of the best teams in baseball, stocked with future Hall of Famers Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Red Schoendienst, and Warren Spahn. Selig remembers tears of joy when the Braves beat the Yankees in Game 7 of the 1957 World Series, and tears of anguish when the Braves lost another seven-game Fall Classic to the Yankees in ’58. Selig would eventually invest in the team, and when attendance began to wane in the early 1960s and there were rumors of a move to Atlanta, he formed a group of civic leaders and sued to keep the Braves in town. That effort failed, and following a lame duck season in 1965, baseball was gone. There was great sadness in our city, said former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, Selig’s boyhood friend.

Manager Dave Bristol strides to the foul line for introductions before the Brewers’ very first Opening Day in 1970, a 12–0 loss to the California Angels.

Selig made it his mission to bring baseball back. Kohl, who at about the same time was working to bring an NBA franchise to Milwaukee, was among the original investors in Selig’s cause. And so, with a little bit of money and a tenuous foot in the door of Major League Baseball by virtue of ongoing legal matters against the Braves, Selig spent the next five years trying, and failing, to land a team. He hoped to land an American League expansion team at the 1967 Winter Meetings, but Kansas City and Seattle were picked instead. In May ’68, Selig thought he had secured enough votes of the other owners to land a National