Beginning with the Braves: Milwaukee and Stadium Development in the Postwar American City

Until now, the history of Milwaukee’s first major-league baseball team, the Braves, has almost invariably surfaced as a footnote or, at best, an introductory vignette in scholarly studies of the professional sports business. Rarely have urban historians treated the Braves’ move to and abbreviated tenure in Milwaukee—the team relocated there from Boston in 1953 and moved again, this time to Atlanta, in 1966—as a worthwhile story in its own right.¹ Instead, they have typically mentioned these events in passing as a precursor to the Dodgers’ and Giants’ subsequent migrations from New York to California. In foregrounding the Braves’ stint in Milwaukee, Patrick W. Steele’s Home of the Braves challenges several enduring misconceptions about what made it so brief. It also provides a great deal of insight into how and why, after World War II, major-league sports franchises used their local monopoly powers to lobby successfully for more and more generous corporate welfare from city, county, and state governments.

Steele’s account of the decision by Braves owner Lou Perini to abandon Boston in 1953 for greener pastures in Milwaukee is straightforward, and will prove familiar to those who have read The Dodgers Move West (1987), Neil Sullivan’s seminal study of the Dodgers’ cross-country move later the same decade. Changes in “postwar demographics” made unoccupied Midwestern markets more attractive to franchises like the Dodgers and Braves.² Northeastern central cities with multiple major-league teams hemorrhaged residents into the suburbs, where many opted to stay home rather than commute to downtown stadiums with limited parking. The Braves had long played second fiddle to the Red Sox among fans in Boston, and these population shifts hit the former especially hard. By 1952, the Braves were drawing the fewest spectators of any major-league ball club, and the franchise’s financial future looked bleak as a result. Moreover, Milwaukee County had already built a new, publicly funded sports facility, County Stadium, in hopes that it would burnish the local area’s image and reputation by luring a major-league franchise to the Brew City. Ample parking and attractive stadium lease terms, as well as a promise by the county to immediately invest millions of dollars in facility upgrades, proved more than enough bait to land the Braves. Perini’s club thus became the first major-league baseball team to relocate to a different city since the original Baltimore Orioles became the New York Yankees in 1903.

Where Steele breaks with conventional wisdom is in his analysis of the factors that led the Braves to move yet again, to Atlanta, in 1966, two years after Perini sold the franchise to an ownership group in Chicago. For jilted fans in Milwaukee, this has long been a story of the “sheer greed” of “absentee owners determined to improve their profit margin” (p. 4). According to Braves’ ownership, by contrast, the decision to ditch the Brew City for Atlanta owed to the failure of Milwaukee residents to sustain interest in and support for the team. Drawing on a wealth of municipal archives, legal records, and newspaper reports, Home of the Braves shows that both interpretations leave something to be desired.

Steele points persuasively to national shifts in the sports and media industries after the Second World War to undercut the owners’ repeated assertion that, by the early 1960s, Milwaukee fans had simply become too apathetic to support a profitable major-league baseball franchise. In 1953, the Braves set a National League attendance record of more than 1.8 million. They stood atop the league in ticket sales for the next five years, including a banner campaign in 1957 when the team drew 2.2 million fans on its way to besting the New York Yankees in the World Series. To be sure, annual attendance fell precipitously in the early 1960s, dropping to well under a million in 1962. However, Steele shows that pinning this...