John Klima - Bushville Wins!: The Wild Saga of the 1957 Milwaukee Braves and the Screwballs, Sluggers, and Beer Swiggers Who Canned the New York Yankees and Changed Baseball

To underdogs everywhere

CONTENTS

We played in a city like Milwaukee, who each night had 4045,000 people at the ballpark, and they went out for one thingto see the ball club be successful.

HENRY AARON, 2011

PART I

THE SHIFT

DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH

Lou Perinis secret weighed on him like the water pails he once hauled on his fathers work crew. He had a plan so extraordinary he dared tell nobody, not breathing a word to his wife, his seven children, or the Jesuit priest who routinely passed him while he whispered his daily rosary. But on the morning of March 14, 1953, when Perini emerged in the lobby of the Dixie Grande Hotel after an exhaustive all-night planning session, his tousled hair and crooked collar were barely a shade better kept than the Boston sportswriters. Perini had a blueprint for the future so bold that it was going to change baseball forever.

Perini was a forty-nine-year-old bulldozer of a man, the firm son of Italian immigrants and American prayers and dreams, born and raised on Boston baseball. He had an eighth-grade education but possessed a natural ability for engineering and an obsession with efficiency and productivity. The game was his passion but being president of his familys construction company was his profession. He inherited the business from the father who taught him humility, equality, and togetherness by requiring him to haul water pails for workers on steaming hot summer days. His father, Bonfiglio Perini, had arrived in America with nothing, scratched his name into the Ellis Island registry, and clawed his way to the top. He insisted his sons speak English and he taught them to appreciate all people and to believe that wealth should never equal tyranny. After Bonfiglio died, Louis built the local family construction business into an international corporation, with savvy befitting a tycoon and the humble gratitude of a man of God.

For all the highways and bridges, and subways and runways that Perini built, almost nothing meant as much to him as building his baseball team, the Boston Braves. He saw baseball as a bridge to a better world. There were two teams in Boston thenthe Red Sox and the Braves. The wealthy Red Sox were never for sale; the impoverished Braves were. So in 1944, Perini and two of his construction pals bought into the dream. Perinis first significant move was to fire manager Casey Stengel. Fast with a quip and slow with a win, Casey lived in sixth place. Perini wanted to die in first.

Perini and his partners were nicknamed the Three Shovels, and even though the Braves made it to the 1948 World Series, there wasnt enough money in Boston to dig the Braves out of obscurity. They went from bad to worse, their ballpark was a plywood dump in the wrong part of town, and their players werent much better. Their fan base was going strong on the nostalgia of the 1914 World Series champ Miracle Braves. Memories were plentiful but ticket sales were poor. Perini used to bring his family to the ballgames just to help fill the stands. The fans were few and dying, so Perini bought out his partners and began plotting the path to save the Braves.

He was never happy unless he was building, but he wasnt happy building from the boardroom. He abhorred silk suits in favor of heavy wool and wore the same cheap necktie until it was so worn that his wife made him throw it out. But when it was time to do business, Perini became a bulldozer. He moved ideas and men and he plowed them over if they stood in his way. But Perini never saw himself as a bully. He invested heavily in a charity he created called the Jimmy Fund. He was a former sandlot catcher who wrote large checks for football stadiums and donated large sums of money to amateur sports programs. Sports were for dreamers and offered paths to new lives. Perini understood that nobody wanted to be on the bottom forever. Baseball offered a wondrous opportunity for equality and a fertile proving ground for the underdog.

When Perini barreled into the lobby of the Dixie Grande that spring training morning in Florida, he was the underdog. The Boston sportswriters thought Perini must have made a big trade. They were right in one sensePerini was making a trade, but not for a player. He was about to let the world in on his secret and blow up tradition.

This was a difficult decision to make, Perini announced. But weve made up our minds to take the team into Milwaukee.

Perini was furiously trying to keep control of a plan he devised in 1950 and hoped to execute in 1954. But time and circumstances were working against him. If Perini was going to save his dying franchise, the time had come to plow the earth. The dumbfounded Boston sportswriters peppered Perini with questions. He avoided the details because he didnt have time, and the transaction was complicated. Baseball writers knew how to handle big news about ballplayers, but this was something else. They were exploring factors none of them had experience with. Instinctively, they resented that an outsider like Perini defied the baseball establishment. They felt entitled to the scoop and were furious and insulted that he hadnt warned them the day before, when he had denied the rumors of the Braves leaving Boston. When I said it I meant it, Perini shot back. I was sincere but things came up that make it necessary for us to move.

The world sighed in unison: why Wisconsin? The Milwaukee Brewers had been a minor league team since 1902, one stop below the big leagues in classification, and a few dozen steps lower in national respect. They had a short stint as a National League team seventy-five years ago, but that was before the modern majors existed. In 1950, a dozen American cities were larger. Milwaukees population of 600,000 was less than one-tenth of New York Citys seven million. Why would Perini betray the proud Boston baseball tradition in favor of the Germanic Midwestern city they knew only by stereotype? For many across the country, Milwaukee was the train station on the way to Chicagoa fine place for a trip to the restroom, a bratwurst at a minor league game, and a cheese wheel. Old European prejudices prevailed and archaic images of gruff German and Polish working sloths who could barely say Ticket, please in proper English came to mind.

As an Italian in an Irish town, Perini had grown up around that sort of ethnic discrimination. It motivated and guided his conscience. He was a man for the people, especially when it made good business sense. But Perini also believed this was about more than money. For months, he had saturated himself with Milwaukee research. He collected maps and studied its civic planning. He understood its economy and grasped the huge financial component. And he invited a special guest over to the family home in Boston for dinner. I remember coming home from school a few times and Fred Miller was at the house, Lous son, David, remembered. My dad just introduced him as Mr. Miller from the Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I wasnt sure who he was or why he was there.

Perini wasnt surprised that the Boston writers were crushing him. They used to call him Lovable Lou, but not this time. Perini knew the writers hated his decision, but he wasnt afraid to fight. The Boston Braves were losing $30,000 a week and losses exceeded one million dollars in both 1951 and 1952. The Boston Braves had been established in 1876, but couldnt compete emotionally or economically with the Red Sox. On mantels from Connecticut to Maine were framed images of Jesus Christ and Ted Williams, though which one walked on water first was debatable. The Braves most popular player was Warren Spahn, a young left-handed pitcher, whose box-office draw was limited to once every four games, and then only at home, where Braves Fields finest delicacy, fried clams, wasnt enough to compete with storied Fenway Park. Perini felt the pinch when Braves attendance bottomed out at 281,000 in 1952, his ball club so pathetically dismal and lacking energy that the home plate umpire jumped a train home before the end of the last game of the season.