The Creation of the Milwaukee Brewers
Prologue:
The Milwaukee Brewers have won the World Series for the first time in franchise history. The numbers speak for themselves: They were in one of the longest World Series droughts alongside the Seattle Mariners (50 seasons), Cleveland Guardians (78 seasons), San Diego Padres (55 seasons), Pittsburgh Pirates (47 seasons), Baltimore Orioles (43 seasons), Detroit Tigers (42 seasons), and the New York Mets (40 seasons).
Now, the drought is just one day- the shortest in MLB history. For Brewers fans, it should feel so relieving to be on the other side of the World Series trophy, actually being able to hold it this time. It had been 44 years since their last World Series appearance, 56 since their move to Milwaukee, and 57 in total as a franchise (since 1969).
But the city of Milwaukee has been through a lot of turmoil in its 56 years of hosting the Brewers, especially at the start. Getting the Brewers was a very complicated process, one that took years to do, and it broke the heart of another city entirely.
How did this happen? Well, sit tight for something amazing…
The “Prolonged” Search:
Before the 1969 Expansion Draft, the Milwaukee Brewers were once a major league team for just one season in 1901, ironically enough, before moving to St. Louis and becoming the St. Louis Browns, who would move to Baltimore and become the Orioles in 1954.
Meanwhile, the Boston Braves would move to Milwaukee within that same year span in March of 1953 and become the Milwaukee Braves. They moved to Atlanta just over a decade later in 1966, becoming the Atlanta Braves. So if you do the math correctly, Milwaukee would not have an MLB franchise for four seasons, and they were left without an expansion team for 1969.
The reason why Milwaukee didn’t get a new team at the time was because of their fallout with the Braves leaving just three years prior. They sued the Braves, the National League, and the other club owners in the NL for allegedly violating Wisconsin’s antitrust law. They believed the owners were conspiring against Wisconsin and wanted them to leave for a potentially bigger baseball market in Atlanta, while also not rewarding them with another team.
They inevitably lost the case, mainly because Wisconsin, only one state in a country where baseball is played nationally, cannot control what the league can or cannot approve of a team moving in or out of a city…which is a true and reasonable verdict.
Not only that, but in 1968, the city got even more agitated when the NL awarded its two new teams to take place in Montreal and San Diego instead. Milwaukee, in the eyes of many league owners, was too close to Chicago and Detroit, which host three of the longest-lasting baseball franchises in America, and would not have a huge clientele of fans.
Also, the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota in 1961, eight years prior, so the league was justifiably hesitant about adding another major league franchise to the Northern Central region of the U.S., and believed adding a fourth franchise to the West Coast in California would’ve been the better option.
San Diego was appealing because, one, the San Diego Chargers had moved there in 1961 from Los Angeles, and were playing in San Diego Stadium, a facility that could easily fit into the current mold of a multi-purpose stadium that can host both football AND baseball games. Secondly, the political backing from Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley, who moved out of Brooklyn in 1957, while helping Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham move with him to the West Coast in a two-for-one deal, heavily supported the idea of having another potential division rival without having to fly across the country.
Montreal was also appealing because baseball officially wanted to expand its market to Canada. Funny enough, O’Malley was also involved in such decisions, mainly because it was where his minor league team, the Montreal Royals, played, and it was a potentially deep baseball market. So with that, and the city promising the league a state-of-the-art domed stadium to be built by 1971, it was an easy decision for the NL to make.
Milwaukee lobbied hard to get another team with an ownership group led by a local car salesman, Bud Selig. A reminder, too, that Milwaukee had an already-built Milwaukee County Stadium, which previously hosted the Braves before their departure. It would’ve been much easier for the NL to choose them instead of starting two teams from scratch, but the scars from the punches of Milwaukee’s lawsuit were still fresh. So NL owners flat-out rejected the city entirely.
All hope was lost, at least in the near future, regarding the city of Milwaukee getting another baseball team. But there was one specific team that would turn things in their favor, and it was in the American League.
The Problem in Seattle:
Fun fact: The expansion draft for both leagues would’ve happened in 1971; however, something was brewing in the state of Missouri that prevented this.
The American League had previously approved moving the Athletics out of Kansas City to Oakland after the 1967 season, officially creating a fourth California franchise since 1955. For the city of Kansas City and Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, it was a betrayal lamented by few. But the league promised him a new team, and it would be ready no later than 1971.
But Symington wasn’t pleased. He and the state had just approved a state-of-the-art sports facility complex that included two stadiums: Kauffman Stadium and Arrowhead Stadium. The NFL had previously approved the Dallas Texans to move to Kansas City, where they would become what we know as the Chiefs. If he had no baseball team to complement them in that two-for-one complex deal, the taxpayers would be paying for truly only one franchise with an extra vacant stadium.
That would obviously not bode well for Symington, and to let Charles Finley, a man who Symington and others had heavily despised BEFORE the move, walk away with a team that Kansas City wanted to call theirs, it was embarrassing to see. He threatened to do what Milwaukee failed to do: go straight to the federal government and use his power as U.S. Senator to strip the league entirely of their federal antitrust exemption that allowed the league to move, disband, or replace teams without facing monopolies or antitrust lawsuits. This exemption was signed in the Supreme Court back in 1922, and with the political pull that Symington had, it could’ve been a reality. This would’ve completely changed the scale of how much authority the league would’ve had going forward.
The American League had no choice but to abide by Symington’s demands. This meant they had to bullrush for another expansion team alongside Kansas City. The league had many options, but ultimately chose Seattle. Seattle was an appealing location to Charles Finley before choosing Oakland, so there was already a stepping stone regarding expanding further north of the West Coast.
With that, both the Kansas City Royals and the Seattle Pilots were born. They had their respective expansion drafts in October of 1968 and commenced their first season in 1969.
The problem with Seattle was that their first baseball team couldn’t generate as much revenue as they wanted to, at least compared to what other teams were earning around this time. To put it bluntly: it was an unmitigated disaster.
Since they were an expansion team, they were, as expected, basement dwellers in the division the entire year. They went 64–98, finishing 33 games behind the first-place Minnesota Twins. But the main issue was with their stadium.
Sick’s Stadium was a minor-league ballpark, but was considered to be one of the best by those standards. By the time their home opener came along, the ballpark had aged very poorly. The city bought the site in 1965 from the Sick family after Earl Sick died the year prior, and it had not been maintained at all in those four years.
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The reason why Charles Finley rejected Seattle was because of the stadium, famously calling it a “pigsty," and utterly refusing to move into that facility, even temporarily. The same thing happened with the Cleveland Indians, where their owner, William Daley, was intrigued by the thought of moving to the West Coast. However, city officials did not want to do the necessary upgrades for the ballpark, so Daley reconsidered the idea.
Senator Symington’s rush to get a team back to Kansas City ultimately cost time for what could’ve been much-needed upgrades to a stadium in Seattle that needed one to support a major league team. If he waited patiently until 1971, the stadium would’ve had all the upgrades they needed promptly, and the Pilots would’ve broken even financially, and we may have never gotten the Mariners.
But obviously, that was not the case.
When the Pilots arrived, stadium upgrades didn’t begin until January, three months before their first season. Fans had to wait a few innings for workers to finish the left-field bleachers before they could sit there. Not only that, but only 18,000 seats were at Sick’s Stadium by the time Opening Day started. While they were finishing the left field bleachers, they were nowhere close to finishing the right field bleachers. They didn’t reach 25,000 seats until June, and there were too many obstructed views for fans in those new seats.
With an incompletely renovated ballpark and a rushed beginning, the attendance levels were at an obvious low. They reached only 678,000 fans the entire season at Sick’s, which was 20th out of the 24 teams in 1969. Financially, they lost their asses, big time. The ownership group, led by the Soriano brothers, was already undercapitalized, and having this worst-case scenario of a season made things a hundred times worse.
Funny enough, Indians owner William Daley had financially backed the two brothers as part of their ownership group. But even he saw the signs and eventually refused to put up any more funding for them. With no certain future for Seattle’s first team, another ownership group was watching this unravel in the shadows…
Milwaukee vs. Seattle:
An ownership group led by Bud Selig had met with the head of the Pilots franchise, Dewey Soriano, in private a month before the end of the 1969 season. He actually agreed to sell the Pilots to Selig for $10.8 million on Saturday, October 11th, but the process was outlandishly long.
This was because the rest of the Pilots' owners turned the acquisition down because of the immense pressure from Warren Magnuson and Harry “Scoop” Jackson, the two Washington Senators at the time.
So, this gave a huge opportunity to localists from Seattle who wanted to keep the Pilots in the state, knowing that if Selig had bought the team, he would've immediately moved them to Milwaukee. From then on, it was a battle between Milwaukee and Seattle for who would land the Pilots, and it got very chaotic.
First off, the city of Seattle had its own problems to deal with. Sick’s Stadium, as aforementioned, was no longer feasible for a major league franchise, let alone any team at that rate. It was, in fact, an absolute shithole.
They had to figure out a location for the new stadium, and it was dependent on the future of the franchise, and King County was having a difficult time figuring out where it would break ground. The funding was secured in 1968 once the city was given the Pilots by the American League, but there was NO location decided yet. They had reportedly over 100 sites spread throughout the city of Seattle and King County as a whole. They had finally decided on the area at Seattle Center with a unanimous vote to boot. But with petitions from stadium opponents, the project was halted.
Even with the stadium not breaking ground in time, local theater chain owner Fred Danz, alongside hotel head Eddie Carlson and restaurateur Dave Cohn, tried to save this franchise. They approached the Sorianos with an offer that would buy them out and also reduce Daley’s stake in the team to 30%. They had footing: the offer was given preliminary approval in December that year.
But, unbeknownst to the league and other officials, Bank of California came forward, approving a $4 million loan that the Soriano brothers wanted to take out so they could fork up the money to keep the team. The kicker? The franchise ITSELF was put up as collateral. But because it was approved, if Danz and company wanted to buy the team, the entire $4 million loan amount would’ve been due immediately upon approval.
Because of this, Danz’s ownership group backed out of the offer.
This was incredibly stupid on the Sorianos end. If this loan was never taken out, Danz would’ve bought the Pilots, and they would’ve probably never left Seattle. Don’t think of it as anything more than foolish optimism. They bit off more than they could chew, and they were way in over their heads to begin with. They thought they could pull funding out of their asses by the time the new season came around, make profitable margins, and pay off the loans before anybody noticed.
Eddie Carlson tried to do one last-ditch effort by creating an ownership group of his own to buy the Pilots, but it was a nonprofit group, which the league outright rejected upon first glance. The American League believed that “no one person, group, or firm” would be held responsible if they didn’t fork up the money for the debts because of the loose ownership structure. They also thought it would devalue all the other privately owned baseball clubs, which is correct.
Carlson modified the proposal by January of 1970, when he actually convinced Daley to be financially responsible for said debts, but also only have a 30% stake in the team. Bank of California also approved keeping the current loan payments active after the sale, not forcing them to fork up the full amount right away. But that proposal still came one vote short of approval.
Delaying the inevitable at this point, the Sorianos received a loan from the owners by the spring of 1970 to pay off their outstanding debts, worth $650,000. Even if, the Sorianos and Daley declared bankruptcy in March, the league ended up taking control of the team. The league ended up giving tentative approval of the sale of the Pilots to Selig, only barred by the state injunctions issued by the state of Washington in an attempt to thwart Selig’s efforts.
But it turned out that the Sorianos strategically declared bankruptcy in order to bypass the injunction. On March 31st, they were officially declared bankrupt in bankruptcy court, and Selig was officially given the Seattle Pilots.
He was moving them to Milwaukee…
The Move to Milwaukee:
The Pilots moved to Milwaukee and, because it was so late of an acquisition, the now-named “Brewers” were stuck in the AL West due to conflicts with the schedule. From then until they were realigned to the AL East in 1972, they had to suffer through long road trips, the longest and most tiresome of any MLB team.
Also, fun fact: the team equipment trucks were stuck in Utah in March, awaiting the fate of the Seattle Pilots, whether or not they were heading to Milwaukee or staying in the city.
The Brewers still had the same design language and colors on their uniforms, but obviously changed it to the “M” on the caps, “Milwaukee,” and “Brewers” on the jerseys. Selig wanted to change the colors to navy blue and red in honor of the minor league Brewers and the former Milwaukee Braves, but again, it was too late to do any of that. They kept the same color scheme that the Pilots had, and Selig took his sweet time changing it. The colors of their team would not change until 2000, two years after being moved to the National League after the 1998 MLB Expansion.
As for Seattle, they were left without a team for only seven years before getting rewarded another team in the American League called the “Seattle Mariners”, but that’s a whole other story…
…one that will be told in time…
