As County Stadium’s final night of hosting the Braves began, first baseman Gene Oliver stood for the final rendition of the National Anthem. (COURTESY OF BOB BUEGE)
Milwaukee’s once-hot romance with the Braves had deteriorated into a full- fledged, mud-flinging divorce. Before the start of the 1965 season, the county continued to refuse owner Bill Bartholomay’s $500,000 buyout offer unless the National League promised to replace the Braves with an expansion franchise. Showing their contempt for the team’s lame-duck status, the Braves’ owners removed “Milwaukee” from all team-licensed souvenirs and merchandise. At souvenir stands around County Stadium, baseball caps with the “M” were replaced with ones sporting a block-letter “A.” Magazine-sized scorecards became nothing more than a couple of pages wrapped around a roster insert. The team’s yearbook was shrunk to half its previous size, made no mention of Milwaukee on the cover, and listed the Braves franchise’s address in Atlanta. Claiming that the club had lost $3.5 million in Milwaukee, due in large part to flagging attendance, the owners blamed the “anti-baseball climate” for driving them away. “The team and ownership were continually being knocked down, besmirched and vilified,” president and general manager John McHale claimed the following year. “Taking a crack at the Braves became a political pastime in Milwaukee, which, together with the unfriendly press, set the stage for killing baseball.”
While referring publicly to the community’s alleged hostility as their excuse for leaving, Bartholomay and his associates’ actions reminded fans across the country that the national pastime was, after all, a business—one motivated by the almighty dollar. Because baseball didn’t pool local television and radio broadcast revenues to distribute equally among the teams, owners were free to squeeze their individual domains dry without sharing a drop with fellow owners. Although selling broadcast rights was not yet a billion-dollar revenue stream, it was fast becoming a lucrative source of income. In 1964 the Milwaukee Braves received $400,000 for their local broadcasts, slightly below league average. At season’s end, the Schlitz Brewing Company offered the Braves $535,000 a year for three years, but Milwaukee’s limited advertising market of 2.5 million television households halted at Chicago to the south, Minneapolis to the west, Canada to the north, and Lake Michigan to the east. Atlanta offered a seven-state empire of six million baseball-deprived households between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River. The team received $2.5 million from Coca-Cola for its first broadcast contract in Atlanta, as Braves ownership cashed in on Major League Baseball’s neglect of the South.
Bill Bartholomay showcased Atlanta’s soon-to-be-completed stadium as the future home of the Braves. (DAVID KLUG COLLECTION)
Milwaukee fans soon turned their passion for the Braves into an exercise of spite. “City stores and banks removed Braves schedules from their counters. Because Atlanta was the home city of the Coca-Cola Company, Milwaukee bars and restaurants stopped selling Coke,” manager Bobby Bragan recalled. “It was horrible.”
Back in 1953, Milwaukee could not have predicted the consequences of demonstrating to baseball owners how profitable moving a franchise could be. Now Atlanta had followed Milwaukee’s formula for seducing a willing franchise with the enticement of a new, teamless stadium and the opportunity to rebrand a community as Big League. “If ever a city lifted its skirts and crooked its finger and winked its eye at a susceptible, fan-rejected, unloved baseball franchise,” proclaimed Furman Bisher in Miracle in Atlanta: The Atlanta Braves Story, “Milwaukee is the guilty party.”
During the off-season, the Braves made no attempt to market tickets in Milwaukee; after selling 4,477 season tickets for the 1964 season, they had sold only 36 before opening day of 1965. By mid-February team officials were desperate to boost ticket sales and generate any sort of revenue. They approached the same group of local Milwaukee businessmen whose “Go to Bat for the Braves” campaign had fallen short, with an offer to put ticket sales proceeds in a fund to help promote and preserve big-league baseball in Milwaukee.
The club offered five cents per ticket on the first 766,927 tickets sold—a figure chosen to match the Braves’ previous low attendance in Milwaukee, then twenty-five cents per ticket between that number and one million, and a dollar per ticket for each ticket over the million mark. The group was now formally organized as Teams, Inc., and was led by the twenty-nine-year-old son of Wisconsin’s biggest Ford dealer, Allan “Bud” Selig, and Edmund Fitzgerald, president of Cutler-Hammer Company. Teams, Inc., used the opportunity to reassure major-league owners that Milwaukee was still a major-league-caliber city by organizing the “Stand Up for Milwaukee Day” ticket drive for County Stadium’s Opening Day and attracted 33,874 fans. Embarrassed by the results, Braves ownership refused to allow Teams, Inc., to buy out any other games. “That was the last time County Stadium was over half full for a Braves game,” Eddie Mathews remembered in Eddie Mathews and the National Pastime.
Milwaukee’s largest crowd during the 1965 season filled County Stadium for the home opener and watched Eddie Mathews (at bat) and the Braves beat the Cubs. (MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL)
The Braves pulled out a 5–1 victory against the Cubs behind Bob Sadowski’s complete-game four-hitter. But after attracting what would be the largest crowd of the entire lame-duck season, County Stadium drew fewer than a combined ten thousand fans during the next three home games. “They stayed away in droves,” Hank Aaron recalled.
Regardless of the constant bickering among team officials, the press, politicians, and fans, the Braves were thought to be strong contenders for the pennant. “Despite such distractions, I really thought we could give Milwaukee fans a final National League pennant,” Braves manager Bobby Bragan remembered. “McHale wanted to know what the ownership could expect by way of a 1965 finish, and I said honestly that we ought to contend again.”
Once again Eddie Mathews was the cornerstone of the Milwaukee Braves’ lineup as he began his fourteenth straight season at third base. “Eddie was a gamer. He was always ready to play no matter what shape he was in,” Braves pitcher Denny Lemaster explained. “What Eddie did after he left the ballpark I always felt was his own business. Bragan was a teetotaler and didn’t think anybody else should drink either.” But the Braves skipper constantly struggled with Mathews’s violations of team rules, from drinking on flights to breaking mandatory curfews. And although he was statistically ranked as the ninth-highest all-time home-run hitter with 445 career round-trippers before the start of the 1965 season, Eddie Mathews’s on-field productivity was quickly declining. “I do believe it’s true that as great as Eddie Mathews was, he’d have been even greater if he’d taken better care of himself,” Bragan proclaimed.
Used mainly as a reliever out of the Braves bullpen in 1965, rookie pitcher Phil Niekro sported a 2.89 ERA and saved six games for Milwaukee. (ALL-AMERICAN SPORTS, LLC)
Eddie Mathews was named team captain in 1965, despite manager Bobby Bragan’s reservations about his drinking and his deteriorating performance. (ALL-AMERICAN SPORTS, LLC)
After hitting forty-six home runs during the 1959 campaign, Mathews had managed to hit only twenty-three in both the 1963 and 1964 seasons; his batting average dipped from a career high of .306 in 1961 to an anemic .233 by 1964. Hoping to rein in his star batsman’s partying ways, Bragan appointed Mathews team captain for 1965. “Maybe Bragan thought appointing me captain would make me get back before curfew. Wrong again, Bobby,” Mathews said.
Once again the Braves started slowly, and by the end of April they sat in fifth place with a mediocre 5–5 record. In May they won seven out of ten games to leapfrog from seventh place to fourth. Following a successful West Coast road trip in June, the Braves hovered only a few games behind the National League–leading Dodgers for more than two weeks, but even this didn’t fill seats at County Stadium. “The last year in Milwaukee was so different from the first. The crowds were gone. Most of the time at the stadium they didn’t even open the upper deck,” Eddie Mathews recalled. “The people that did come to the ballpark treated the players very well, but they booed the hell out of Bragan every time he left the dugout.”
As the team’s field manager, during home games Bragan was the target of the community’s growing anger toward Braves management. “The fans who showed up at County Stadium made up for their small numbers with tremendous amounts of invective,” Bragan admitted. “Never doubt that players and managers on the field hear the insults hurled at them from the stands. You can pretend not to listen, but you do.”
As the only two Braves officials still in Milwaukee during the summer of 1965, John McHale and Donald Davidson took the brunt of the city’s resentment away from the stadium. Hardly a week passed without some damage to their homes. Vandals tossed firecrackers into their yards, plastered their front doors with eggs, and posted “For Sale” signs on their front lawns. “The environment was so unpleasant that my kids were abused in school and my wife couldn’t walk on her own lawn,” Davidson recalled.
Compounding the fans’ growing hostility was management’s continued efforts to build fan interest in Atlanta while the team was still in Milwaukee. First, Braves owners scheduled a trio of exhibition games in Atlanta after the team broke its 1965 spring training camp. That initial series at Atlanta Stadium drew 106,000 eager spectators over three dates. In June, Atlanta hosted the Braves on consecutive Mondays for charity games against the White Sox and Twins. Braves management delighted in announcing that their five exhibition games in Atlanta had drawn more fans than the team’s first twenty-eight games of the season in Milwaukee. They were so desperate to get out of Milwaukee that Bartholomay again offered county officials $500,000 to let his team move during the upcoming All-Star break in July. Again the county refused. Braves management even offered the broadcast rights for free to any Wisconsin radio station willing to air their games. But the fans rejected any attempt management made to generate interest or revenue in Milwaukee.
Following back-to-back doubleheader sweeps by the Reds and the Mets in late June, the Braves’ 41–39 record had them mired in fifth place at the All-Star break. For the July 13 game at Minnesota’s Metropolitan Stadium, Henry Aaron made his eleventh consecutive appearance and Joe Torre his second. They were part of one of the most amazing batting lineups ever assembled, also featuring Willie Mays, Willie Stargell, Ernie Banks, Pete Rose, Maury Wills, Roberto Clemente, and Frank Robinson. In the National League’s 6–5 victory, Aaron contributed a single and Torre a two-run homer.
Following the All-Star break, the Braves’ ten-game winning streak—their longest in four years—lifted the club into third place. By August 18 the Braves were the hottest team in baseball, having won twenty-seven of thirty-seven since the All-Star break. To make it three straight wins over the Cardinals, the Braves faced one of their biggest mound nemeses. “The one guy who Henry [Aaron] could not hit was Curt Simmons of the St. Louis Cardinals,” Joe Torre remembered in his memoir, Chasing the Dream. “So Simmons would throw Henry one big, slow sloppy curveball after another, and Henry never hit them.” With one out in the top of the eighth, Aaron connected on one of Simmons’s lobs and blasted it beyond the wall in right-center field for his 394th career home run. But as Aaron circled the bases, plate umpire Chris Pelekoudas called him out for stepping outside of the batter’s box. “Well, just about our entire ballclub went nuts. Pelekoudas wound up ejecting several of our guys,” Torre recalled. “If he hadn’t, the magical number atop the all-time home-run list would be 756, not 755.” The Braves played the remainder of the game under protest, until Tony Cloninger held on for the 5–3 win and his eighteenth victory of the season.
Pitcher Curt Simmons often commented that “sneaking a fastball past Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster.” (DAVID KLUG COLLECTION)
Gary Manteufel and Paul Dankert proved that there was often plenty of space around County Stadium before games in 1965 to get in a game of catch. (MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL)
The win, combined with a Dodgers loss, put Milwaukee in first place after April for the first time since 1959. But the Braves proceeded to drop nine of their next eleven games, including six in a row at County Stadium. Their swift descent in the standings prompted Milwaukee County Board chairman Eugene Grobschmidt to once again question the team’s motives, implying that they didn’t act like a team that wanted to win and saying, “[I]t would look silly if they played the World Series here and then moved to Atlanta.”
The thirteen-year union between Milwaukee and the Braves was damaged beyond repair. Team management began hurling insults back at the politicians. “Bragan told the press that Milwaukee would still own the Braves if the county had been as interested in not losing the team as politicians now were in the team’s losing games,” Donald Davidson recalled.
On the field, Bragan piloted a brief pitching renaissance in September that got the Braves within two and a half games of first place. “In New York on September 10 through 12, Braves hurlers pitched back-to-back one-hitters, then lost a heartbreaking 1–0, ten-inning game that signaled the beginning of the end for pennant aspirations,” Braves historian Bob Buege wrote.
The Braves’ pennant drive finally fizzled as they dropped fourteen of their final twenty-one games. Their late-season efforts featured a potent offense that built leads with the bats of Henry Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Mack Jones, Joe Torre, Felipe Alou, and Gene Oliver, but the pitching staff couldn’t hold those leads. “We were a club that could pound the ball as well as anyone,” Torre said of the 1965 team that set a National League record with six players hitting at least twenty home runs—and finished fifth. “Our problem was that we couldn’t hold down the other teams. We never had enough pitching. I joined the Braves just as the golden years of pitchers—Spahn, Burdette and Buhl—were running out. The pitchers who followed them, such as Tony Cloninger, Hank Fischer, Wade Blasingame, and Denny Lemaster, never developed into the same kind of consistent winners.”
Milwaukee’s sluggers led the National League in home runs with 196 as a record six players—(from left to right) Felipe Alou, Henry Aaron, Gene Oliver, Eddie Mathews, and (not pictured) Mack Jones and Joe Torre—all hit at least twenty homers. (ROBERT KOEHLER COLLECTION)
Playing their final ten games on the road in San Francisco, Houston, and Los Angeles, the Braves finished eleven games behind the pennant-winning Dodgers with an 86–76 record. As Joe Torre explained, “We were never terrible but almost always barely a notch above mediocre.” County Stadium attendance reached an all-time low of 555,584 for the year. Having lost three out of four fans who had followed the Braves during the late ’50s, the stadium’s income didn’t even begin to cover costs, and the team lost nearly $1 million while playing out a season that no one wanted.
As the end of the 1965 season neared, the Braves shared their County Stadium clubhouse with Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers. (ROBERT KOEHLER COLLECTION)
As the 1965 season wound down, the majority of Milwaukee’s baseball headlines came from the courtroom. Beginning on August 6 Wisconsin attorney general Bronson La Follette waged an attack on organized baseball and filed antitrust lawsuits against the Braves and the National League. The suits charged that by approving the Braves’ transfer without providing Milwaukee a replacement team, the National League conspired to restrain trade and damage the state’s economy. Rather than sue in federal court, where baseball’s well-established antitrust exemption would prevail, the grandson of famous U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette filed the action in state court under Wisconsin’s antitrust law. If victorious, the state could seek injunctions in other states forbidding teams to play Braves home games anywhere but in Milwaukee. A win would set a precedent for other states to bring similar suits against Major League Baseball and force them to grant franchises to their cities or else pay damages.
The Braves’ 1965 pitching staff was led by Tony Cloninger, who won a Milwaukee-era record twenty-four games. (ALL-AMERICAN SPORTS, LLC)
Never before had Major League Baseball faced a state-level antitrust challenge. Legal experts recognized that baseball’s federal exemption might be undone by an adverse ruling that other states would have to respect under the U.S. Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause. It could end the nation’s only federally protected legal monopoly, dating back to 1922—what legal scholars termed “the baseball anomaly.” The National League scrambled to defend itself. Baseball retained veteran antitrust attorney and future baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who later confessed that moving the Braves “gave baseball an irresponsible, gypsy look.”
In open court, state’s attorneys offered to drop the suit in exchange for a new franchise. But the owners protested, claiming that Wisconsin was holding the National League hostage until it promised Milwaukee an expansion team. In its trial brief of November 1965, the state asserted that “Milwaukee is an excellent baseball town, that it is a disgrace to all baseball that it no longer has a major league team, that baseball is a monopoly, and that if it can’t behave better than it has, it deserves to be regulated.”
The ensuing trial in Judge Elmer Roller’s Milwaukee courtroom had lifted the veil of innocence from the national pastime to expose the sport’s true visage—one of greed-motivated monopoly. “There were so many appeals and rulings, restraining orders and injunctions, charges and counter-charges, depositions and whereases, hereuntos and therefores that the general public was lost in the maze,” Furman Bisher wrote in Miracle in Atlanta. “It was becoming a battle royal with any and all combatants invited, but you had to bring your own brass knuckles.”
By challenging baseball’s long-standing antitrust exemption, Wisconsin attorney general Bronson La Follette (center, with glasses) and special counsel for Milwaukee County Steven E. Keane (seated on desk with hands folded) looked to prevent the Braves’ move to Atlanta. (MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL)
In Judge Elmer Roller’s courtroom, special counsel for the state of Wisconsin Willard Stafford (second from left) faced off against Braves attorney Ray McCann (just right of court clerk in center) and Major League Baseball’s counselor Bowie Kuhn (far right). (MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL)
Some optimistic Braves fans still hoped the team would return to Milwaukee following the 1965 season. (MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL)
While the battle for the Braves continued in the courtroom that winter, the team decided to move to Atlanta and let Milwaukee’s lawsuit run its course. With their fate still undecided, the Braves finished spring training and headed to Atlanta for Opening Day. Arriving to a welcoming parade in Atlanta similar to the one in Milwaukee thirteen years earlier, the Braves were determined to host their home opener at Atlanta Stadium against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Owner Bill Bartholomay defiantly proclaimed, “There is as much chance of the Braves playing in Milwaukee this summer as there is of the New York Yankees.”
With the team’s fate in the hands of the court, Milwaukee had prepared County Stadium on April 12 for the 1966 season’s home opener in the event of a decision to return the team to Wisconsin. The next day, Judge Roller ruled against the National League, claiming the Braves franchise had violated Wisconsin’s antitrust laws. The ruling stated that if the National League couldn’t find Milwaukee a new baseball team by 1967, they’d have to return the Braves to Milwaukee within one month. The National League appealed to the state’s Supreme Court and won later that summer. Following a series of injunctions, rulings, reversals, and appeals that continued throughout the 1966 season and into the winter, the state of Wisconsin asked that the U.S. Supreme Court hear the case. On December 12, 1966, the high court voted 4–3 to refuse to hear the final appeal and took no action, upholding baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws and ending the Braves’ legal brawl. Atlanta finally had its Braves.
♦ ♦ ♦
Back on September 22, 1965, while the war waged on in the courtroom, the Braves hosted the Dodgers on a somber Wednesday evening. “The 12,577 mourners who attended the graveside ceremony did not wear black arm bands or veils, but they may as well have,” Bob Buege recalled in The Milwaukee Braves: A Baseball Eulogy. “On a pleasant evening in early autumn of 1965, the remains of the Milwaukee Braves Baseball Club were finally laid to rest in ground formerly occupied by the Old Soldiers’ Home.”
For twelve years in Milwaukee, Eddie Mathews and Henry Aaron terrorized National League pitchers, averaging nearly seventy-one homers and 215 runs batted in per season. (COURTESY OF BOB BUEGE)
On the mound for the pennant-bound Dodgers that night was Sandy Koufax, who was about to win the second of his three Cy Young Awards, while Milwaukee countered with its southpaw ace, Wade Blasingame. But on that night Koufax couldn’t handle the Braves, and he gave up five runs and was pulled by the third inning. Milwaukee built a commanding 6–1 lead behind a Frank Bolling grand slam, a solo homer by Mack Jones, and an inside-the-park homer from Gene Oliver. But the Dodgers battled back to cut the lead to 6–3 in the fourth, and before the fifth inning ended it was tied at 6.
As the game went into the late innings, County Stadium fans put aside their bitterness toward the Braves’ owners and expressed their gratitude toward the players. “As you might expect, that was a very emotional night,” Eddie Mathews confessed. “The reality of leaving Milwaukee was sinking in. Most of the ballplayers didn’t want to go to Atlanta. Aaron and I had been around the longest, and we certainly didn’t want to go. The fans cheered us all night, but when I came to bat in the last of the eighth, for what looked like the last time in Milwaukee, the fans gave me about a two-minute standing ovation. I was overwhelmed. My eyes filled up with tears. I tried to bat, but I had to step out of the batter’s box three or four times. I know I finally did bat. I don’t remember it, though. Everything was a blur. I felt very humble at that moment. Everyone should have a moment like that in his life.”
With the score still tied at 6, the game went into extra innings. The Dodgers finally pulled ahead in the eleventh when Maury Wills bunted for a hit, stole second, and scored on a single. In the Braves’ half of the inning, Mack Jones beat out an infield single and represented the tying run. With one out, Aaron stepped to the plate but lined out to center field. Jones was abruptly doubled off first. “When the game ended and we lost, 7–6, the whole crowd stood and gave us the longest ovation on record. Many of us came out of the dugout and kind of doffed our hats to those wonderful folks. It was the end of an era and the end of probably the best years of my life,” Mathews admitted.
The Braves’ 1,016th and final game at County Stadium ended in extra innings, just like their first back in 1953. When the team’s era in Wisconsin ended, they had never finished lower than six games over .500, placed second five times, and won the pennant twice as the only major-league club never to suffer a losing season while in one city. It was poetic that on the Braves’ last night in Milwaukee, the only two players remaining from the 1957 world championship walked together up the long, cold cement County Stadium corridor. Once Henry Aaron and Eddie Mathews disappeared behind the Braves’ clubhouse door, the end of an era was at hand. The team that had made Milwaukee famous was gone forever.
After years of blaring “Charge” at County Stadium, trumpeter Dick Emmons was often heard reciting “Taps” during the Braves’ final few innings in Milwaukee. (DAVID KLUG COLLECTION)
