The Milwaukee/Atlanta Connection

While my students take their final exams in American history, I have been doing a little history myself about the history of the Braves franchise. The Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta, forever linking the three cities in baseball history. The Braves battle the Red Sox each year in interleague play for this very reason, and it makes a series like the one in Milwaukee this week more special because of the lineage.

The central connection between the two cities in many minds is Hammerin' Hank Aaron. The former homerun king started slugging in Milwaukee, moved with the Braves to Atlanta to hit #715, then returned to Milwaukee as a Brewer to finish his Hall of Fame career. Aaron's story links the two cities just like the Braves franchise, but what exactly is the history of that franchise?

The Braves started in Boston alongside the more popular Red Sox. Despite a pennant in 1948 (the famous "Spahn and Sain and two days of rain" team), the Braves followed several other teams, like the Giants, Dodgers and Athletics, to the growing populations of western cities. Milwaukee earned the Braves in 1953 after years of support for minor league baseball. The city also promised a state of the art stadium for the Braves.

The 1950s featured some of the best teams in Braves' history with superstars like Spahn, Aaron and Eddie Mathews. They won back-to-back pennants in 1957 and 1958, winning the World Series over the New York Yankees in 1957 for their only championship (they lost to the Yanks, despite a 3-1 series lead, in 1958). In fact, the Milwaukee Braves never had a losing record during their stay in Wisconsin.

Despite a championship and consistent winning product, attendance dropped after the '57 championship. There do not seem to be good explanations for what happened to baseball in Milwaukee. Some suggest the city was always partial to the teams in Chicago over their own Braves, while others suggest the city simply lost its fascination with baseball over time.

Either way, the Braves' ownership saw an opportunity to move the team to a growing population in Atlanta, Georgia. The Braves would be the only MLB team in the South and play in a new stadium. There were concerns about moving to Atlanta among players who worried about the humidity as well as racial segregation in the South, but the paltry game attendance in Milwaukee made it difficult for anyone to fight to save the franchise.

Anyone besides used car salesman Bud Selig. The future commish successfully sued to keep the Braves in Milwaukee through its lease in 1965. It only delayed the inevitable as the Braves were heading for Atlanta despite hopes to keep the team in Wisconsin. The final year of the Braves' stay in Milwaukee was a miserable one as there were often less than a thousand fans at the games. Only 812 people paid to watch the final game of the franchise's existence in Milwaukee.

Bud Selig fought to bring baseball back to Milwaukee despite the city's pathetic record with the Braves and succeeded in 1970 when the Seattle Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brewers franchise has failed to achieve the same success as the Braves, making its lone appearance in the World Series in 1982 (a seven-game loss to St. Louis) and switching from the American to the National League in 1998.

The Braves franchise, of course, has had tremendous success in Atlanta because of its geographic monopoly on baseball, the superstation TBS and the development of young players in the farm system.

The Braves and Brewers - forever linked in Milwaukee baseball history.