MLB | The Move That Made Every Other Move Thinkable (Milwaukee County Stadium site)

For fifty seasons, from 1903 to 1952, Major League Baseball had sixteen clubs in ten cities and not one of them moved. On 18 March 1953 Lou Perini took the Braves out of Boston, and the map has not stopped changing since.

Perini's reasons were plain enough. The Braves had drawn 281,278 people in Boston in 1952, less than a third of their 1950 figure and more than 800,000 behind the Red Sox. Milwaukee had a brand new ballpark sitting empty. County Stadium had been built by Milwaukee County in an old quarry on the west side, to replace the wooden Borchert Field and house the minor-league Brewers, and it had parking for close to ten thousand cars. It was the first major-league ballpark designed with lights from the start rather than having them added, and the first paid for entirely out of public money, which is the detail that makes it the ancestor of nearly every stadium deal since.

Perini paid the American Association $50,000 to move his own Triple-A club out of Milwaukee to Toledo. The other seven National League owners approved the move unanimously. Four weeks later the Braves opened the season in Milwaukee in front of about 34,000 people.

They drew 1,826,397 that year, a National League record, and passed two million in each of the next four. Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn played here. The Braves beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series and lost to them in 1958.

Walter O'Malley of the Dodgers read the situation immediately and told a reporter it could set up a chain reaction. He was right, and he was one of the people who set it off: the Dodgers and Giants left New York four years later.

Then Milwaukee learned the other half of the lesson. Attendance fell, Perini sold to Chicago investors in 1962, and the new owners took the club to Atlanta for 1966. Wisconsin sued. Judge Elmer Roller ruled that the Braves and the National League had broken the state's antitrust laws and must either return or give Milwaukee a replacement club. The Wisconsin Supreme Court overruled him. Baseball's federal antitrust exemption, which appears elsewhere in this collection, was the reason a state court could not make that stick.

The stadium sat without baseball until Bud Selig brought the bankrupt Seattle Pilots here in 1970 and renamed them the Brewers.

County Stadium came down in February 2001. Most of the ground is now parking for the ballpark next door, but the old infield was kept and turned into Helfaer Field, a little-league park. Children play on the spot.

Coordinates are Helfaer Field, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: the Braves at Milwaukee County Stadium, September 1960, photographed by the grandfather of Robert Jahnke, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: County Stadium in 1988, photographed by Joel Dinda, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.