The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (14 page)

Less funny was the massive financial hit the Three Little Steam Shovels were taking with the Braves in Boston. In 1950, Perini lost a quarter of a million dollars. The following year, the attendance at Braves Field dropped by nearly half, to 6,250 fans per game.

Future retellings of the Braves demise would always contain a delicious element of the unknown—of what might have been had the Braves remained in Boston another few years and the flowering of the club had taken place there instead of in Milwaukee. Perini had alienated fans, in part by selling off key members of the 1948 pennant team, such as Alvin Dark, Johnny Sain, and Eddie Stanky, but a powerful young nucleus was forming on the club, just at the time when the Red Sox were about to begin a deep and precipitous slide into irrelevancy.

Bill Veeck, the iconoclastic owner of the St. Louis Browns, had realized that St. Louis was not big enough for two teams, and Veeck began searching for relocation possibilities. Suddenly, the gold rush was on, and the teams that never had a prime market to call their own were racing to find the promised land. Milwaukee was first, or a booming equivalent. Veeck wanted to move to Milwaukee, to return the Browns to their original home of fifty years earlier. A group of businessmen from Houston took an interest in purchasing the Cardinals when the owner, Fred Saigh, under federal investigation for tax irregularities, put the team up for sale. Veeck disclosed that a year before Fred Miller’s discussion with Perini at the All-Star Game in 1950, Fred Miller had contacted him and spoken of the possibility of moving the Browns to Milwaukee, and the two would speak again for the next two years, even though Veeck’s real dream was to move the Browns to Los Angeles. He’d tried in 1944, but wartime travel restrictions made it impossible for one team to be located two thousand miles from the next closest club. Plus, Veeck was never popular enough with his fellow owners to be allowed so audacious and potentially lucrative a move.

Perini held the advantage in Milwaukee. His relationship with Miller was strong and he also owned the minor-league club, the Brewers, and held an existing lease on Milwaukee County Stadium. He promised five million dollars in stadium renovations, ostensibly for the Brewers, who had outgrown Borchert Field. The true motive for County Stadium, naturally, was to attract a big-league team. When Perini denied he would ever sell the Braves to any consortium of Milwaukee businessmen, he was being accurate, albeit in a convoluted way. Parse the words, peel off the layers of the onion, and in many ways Perini had shown his hand back in 1951. Milwaukee wouldn’t land a team “until the entire structure of baseball is changed.” It was true: He was not going to sell, but he was going to change the entire structure in one stroke. He was going to move the Braves to Milwaukee himself.

In January 1952, Perini wagered his greatest and last gamble in Boston, spending thirty thousand dollars to charter a Pan American Airways jet to publicize the star players of the Braves farm system. Perini invited five Boston writers, plus a radio commentator and his publicity man, to fly to the hometowns of eighteen of the club’s top prospects, as well as five more who were playing in Puerto Rico and Cuba. The final stop of the 10,361-mile journey was Santa Barbara, California, home of Eddie Mathews, the twenty-year-old slugging third baseman. The jet was dubbed the “Rookie Rocket,” and had it departed six months later, an eighteen-year-old Henry Aaron, playing shortstop in Eau Claire, likely would have merited a stop on the tour.

In the end, the 1952 season broke Lou Perini. On April 15, Spahn lost to the Dodgers 3–2 in front of an opening-day crowd of 4,694. On May 14, 1,105 showed up for the Braves-Pirates game. In the final home game of the season against the Dodgers, 8,822 watched Joe Black beat the home team. The final attendance for the season at Braves Field was 281,278, or an average of 3,563 fans per game, an 80 percent drop in attendance from the 1948 World Series team just four seasons earlier.

The Braves arrived in Bradenton as vagabonds. Perini knew the club would not likely return to Boston for the 1953 season, and he began planning his escape. The cover of the 1953 spring press guide had been redone, removing the name Boston. The new guide did not specify a city, reading simply “The Braves.” During the winter of 1952, Perini engaged in a little behind-the-scenes horse trading. He cajoled his fellow owners to relax the tight restrictions on franchise moves by allowing a major-league team to move into the same territory of a minor-league team without permission from the team or its league. The rule allowed Perini to move into Milwaukee, since he already owned the Brewers. Perini then consolidated his power base, buying out all of his minority partners—including two of the original Steam Shovels, Guido Rugo and Joseph Maney—and replacing them with his two brothers, thus eliminating any potential objection within ownership to a move to Wisconsin. Of the owners, Perini was particularly focused on canvassing Phil Wrigley of the Cubs, Ruly Carpenter of the Phillies, and Connie Mack of the Athletics for support, the owners who shared their cities with another club. He was also keeping a watchful eye on St. Louis, where the Cardinals were for sale, knowing a group of Texas businessmen were hot to move the venerable Redbirds to Houston. Perini told his old friend Wrigley that he needed to support the proposal to make it easier to one day have the city of Chicago to himself. When the sale of the Cardinals to beer magnate August Busch was approved, Perini knew he could count on the support of Bill Veeck, who realized the Cardinals were not going to Houston and now had the resources to become a St. Louis institution once again. That confirmed what Veeck long knew: His St. Louis Browns would again be on the move and would need support.

On March 19, 1953, at a meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida, the league owners approved Perini’s request to transfer the Boston National League franchise to Milwaukee, while rejecting Veeck, who had accepted the second-place prize of Baltimore. At the time of the approval, the Braves were in the fifth inning, playing in a spring-training game. On the scoreboard in Bradenton, the name for the home team read BOS. By the end, the home team was MIL.

The Braves now belonged to Milwaukee.

The sale was complete, but not without a touch of irony. Five years after Perini had successfully lobbied the owners to ease the relocation process, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, engineered the most famous and polarizing relocation in the history of American professional sports. He had voted for the rules and the relocation, while lamenting that the changes would create a “shifting carnival.”

Still, it galled Perini that he, a native son of Boston, was being forced to move, while that Michigan–South Carolina carpetbagger Yawkey, who would never even purchase a permanent residence in the forty-three years he owned the Red Sox, positioned himself as the guardian of Boston baseball. Yawkey and Boston never warmed to each other until 1967, the single most important year in the baseball history of the city (the Red Sox went to the World Series, losing to St. Louis), when more than a decade of losing was wiped clean by the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox. Before then, Yawkey had been disillusioned with baseball and, more to the point, the city politicians who refused to build him a new stadium with public money. To Johnny Logan, it was just another reason why he felt the gods rained on the Boston Braves. If Mathews, Bruton, and Aaron could have reached the majors together as a unit, it might have been the Red Sox who left town. “With the team we had,
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we would have turned Boston upside down,” Logan said. “If we had stayed, we would have owned that city. I was hoping we could stick just a little longer. But we left.”

Even Perini’s successes were somehow either obscured by or co-opted by the Red Sox. In a city always unable to escape its racial contradictions and confrontations, Perini was never part of Boston’s racially unattractive narrative. The Braves were one of the first teams in baseball to integrate, with center fielder Sam Jethroe winning the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1950, and had the Braves remained, the Boston sports scene would have showcased Henry Aaron and Bill Russell (not to mention a fading but always compelling Ted Williams), both at the height of their powers. It was Perini and his ownership group and not Tom Yawkey or the Red Sox that founded the Jimmy Fund, and yet over the decades the famous charity would become synonymous with the Boston Red Sox.

And it galled him equally that he truly was a man of vision, a person who embraced the future as a place of wide opportunity—indeed, the leagues would expand to California, expand internationally, and embrace television, ideas that Perini supported years before his contemporaries. By comparison, Yawkey would be one of the least dynamic owners in the history of the sport, one who viewed change as something to be suppressed. Following the first transcontinental broadcast of a baseball game in 1951, the common attitude toward television was that televising home games would not be a great advertising tool to attract fans or build a greater following for teams whose fans could not attend a game. Instead, it would negatively affect the home gate. Yawkey refused to broadcast even a third of Boston’s home games at Fenway Park. Perini, meanwhile, broadcast sixty-three of the seventy-seven Braves home games. Yawkey would be the name synonymous with baseball ownership in Boston, while Perini was left ashen and melancholy. “Ever since I got into baseball I have given considerable thought to making it more attractive to the fans and the idea of attracting new fans,” Perini said. “Perhaps several of my ideas were too extreme for some, but they were always motivated in the best interests of the game.” Yet, Perini’s hometown simply would not respond to his baseball team, and it was that curious and fatal apathy that created the momentum toward Milwaukee. Perini saw himself as a man of vision, and men of vision did not fight momentum.

T
HE
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RAVES WERE
welcomed to Milwaukee as saviors. In most towns, the bars and restaurants jockeyed to curry favor with the local ball club, everyone wanting to be
the official
establishment of the home team. Milwaukee was no different.

After home games, Duffy Lewis, the Braves traveling secretary, would call Ray Jackson’s Barbecue and tell the bartender to put some bottles on ice—the players were coming over. Wisconsin Avenue was full of hot spots willing to cater to the team. There was Ray Jackson’s, but there were also Fazio’s and Frenchy’s and the authentic German restaurants Mader’s and Karl Ratzsch’s. There was Mick Lewin’s, and for the best steak in town, there was the Hotel Schroeder.

In most towns, the gratuity stopped there—a steak and a beer and a handshake. In Milwaukee, grateful to finally be big league, the red carpet extended to gasoline (Wisco 99 filled the players’ tanks for free), dry cleaning, and furnishings for the wet bar, courtesy of Fred Miller.

“We got automobiles to drive.
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We got dairy products. We got free gasoline. We got free dry cleaning,” Frank Torre recalled. “A case of beer a week, and a case of whiskey a month, I remember. They just fell in love with the team. I was one of the luckiest players in the world. What a unique era it was.”

The ballpark, County Stadium, was supposed to be a minor-league park, and except for the two-tiered grandstand that made a half-moon behind home plate, this was obvious. Down the lines, the grandstands stopped, replaced by odd single-level bleachers that would have looked more at home at a high-school football field. The light stanchions stood 115 feet in the air beyond the outfield fences, tall and alone, except for a row of fir and spruce trees in left center field planted in 1954, called, oddly enough, “Perini pines.”

The best feature of County Stadium was outside of the park’s grounds. On Mockingbird Hill, beyond the right-field fence, sat the National Soldiers VA Hospital. On game days, the vets could sit outside their rooms and watch the games for free.

The park offered glimpses of the future. It was big and roomy, unencumbered by the funky city blocks and angles that defined the old crackerjacks in Boston and Brooklyn. Hugging the outfield in a crescent beginning at third base and stretching to first was enough parking to satisfy an airport.

The 1953 team responded with immediate success—and magic. On opening day at County Stadium, Billy Bruton beat the Cardinals 3–2, with a tenth-inning home run. Mathews, all of twenty-one years old, hit 47 home runs, scored 110 runs, and drove in 135 to go with a .302 average and a second-place finish for the MVP, behind Roy Campanella. Spahn won twenty-three games, losing only seven. Primarily out of the bull pen, Burdette won fifteen games and saved eight more, while the new acquisition from Cincinnati, twenty-five-year-old Joe Adcock, drove in eighty runs. The club finished a distant second, thirteen games behind the 105-win Dodgers, but a 92-win team was something to embrace. At the gate, Perini led the league in attendance at 1.8 million fans, and the $600,000 loss he took in Boston was turned into a profit of nearly three-quarters of a million. The Boston experience did, however, erode some of Perini’s vision. Once in Milwaukee, Perini retreated from his position that television promoted the game and retrenched, refusing to broadcast a significant number of games to his new and excited fan base.

He had been the first owner to move a franchise in half a century, and it worked. Every sad-sack owner in baseball, either saddled behind a more profitable club in the same city or pessimistic about the lump of mud they called home, suddenly wanted to be just like Lou Perini. That was what men of action did with momentum. They found a way to make it work for them, to cultivate it, to give the world the impression that the happenstance of the day was exactly the lucky break for which they had been searching all along.

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ILWAUKEE IN
which Henry Aaron arrived in 1954 was still growing, though not at the rapid pace it had at the turn of the century. It was adjusting to another transition, one that occurred in the years immediately approaching and following World War II: the arrival of thousands of southern blacks during the great migration north. The postwar increase in the black population would produce for Milwaukee one of its great contradictions, for despite its reputation for tolerance, high-quality-of-life Milwaukee earned a reputation as one of the most severely segregated cities in the country.