Fifty years ago the Boston Braves decided to pack up and move to Milwaukee without even saying goodbye.
It was on March 13, 1953 -- Friday the 13th -- that Lou Perini, the Braves owner, let it be known that he wanted to relocate his team after 82 seasons in Boston. Just a few weeks earlier, the Braves' equipment trucks had loaded up and moved out along Commonwealth Avenue en route to the team's spring training base in Florida. For Braves fans, it was to be a one way trip, because those trucks -- and the team -- were ultimately destined for Wisconsin.
It was the first franchise shift in Major League Baseball in 50 years and, when the move was done, the Braves had left a trail of broken hearts behind them including some diehard fans who still honor the memories of the team's storied past.
Sibby Sisti and Andy Pafko, two of the players on that 1953 Braves team, and George Altison, one of the team's most ardent fans, were among many who reacted with surprise and shock when they first heard about the Braves' move.
Sisti had joined the Braves in 1939 when he was only 19, a star high school athlete from Buffalo, N.Y. He had become the team's "super sub" because of his versatility, playing every position in the field except pitcher and catcher. And he had been one of the keys to the Braves' National League pennant in 1948, the first the team had won in 34 years.
"When the news broke about the move, I was in St. Petersburg (Florida) with Warren Spahn filming commercials for Gillette," Sisti recalls. "We were in uniform and they had a set designed to look like a locker room.
"I had done my little bit and, while Warren was filming, I walked into a newsroom which was next to the studio. There was one of those old ticker-tape machines and, while I was waiting, I was reading the news as it came in over the teletype.
"All of sudden I saw an announcement that the Braves were planning to move to Milwaukee. I remember going back into the studio where Warren was filming and telling the people that they'd better replace the 'B' on our caps with an 'M' because the team was moving from Boston to Milwaukee.
"I was very disappointed. I had come up (to Boston) when I was just a kid and I had played my whole career there. And my wife and I had made a lot of friends in the Boston area."
If anyone was more disappointed than Sisti, it had to be Spahn, who was the team's pitching ace. He joined Boston in 1942 and already had four 20-win seasons during a career that would eventually land him in the Hall of Fame as the winningest lefty in baseball history.
In March 1953, Spahn also was getting ready to open a new restaurant, Spahn's Diner, on Commonwealth Avenue near Braves Field. That was the ballpark the team had called home since 1915.
Pafko was a veteran outfielder, obtained by the Braves in an offseason trade with the Dodgers. He was in uniform on the field when the announcement cut through the balmy air of the team's spring training camp in Bradenton, Florida. "I suddenly realized that I was never going to play a game in Boston as a member of the Braves," Pafko has said.
Altison was born and raised almost in the shadow of Braves Field, had been a fan for as long as he can remember and had worked in concessions for a while at the ballpark. On March 13, 1953, he was in the military, serving overseas, and he learned about the Braves' move a few days later in a letter from his father. "Although there had been some speculation, reading about the move was simply unbelievable," Altison recalls. "Teams just didn't move like that back then. And I remember thinking that it was too bad because the Braves were on the road to improvement with (Joe) Adcock, (Bill) Bruton and Pafko added for the season, (Eddie) Mathews ready to break out and (Hank) Aaron close to being ready."
Harold Kaese, a Boston sports columnist, summed up the emotions of many in his March 20 piece written as an open letter from a Boston fan to a Milwaukee fan.
Opening with, "Dear Sudsy: Welcome to the big leagues," Kaese wrote, in part: "You are rolling out a red carpet today, a lovely gesture towards a bunch of callus-toed ballplaying mercenaries. I hope you do not feel like burying them in that same red carpet come August.You have had the Braves 1952 attendance of 281,000 thrown at you so much in recent weeks, you must think Boston fans a lot of cold-blooded, tight-fisted, hard-hearted ingrates. We have been misrepresented. We demand nothing but quality. Are you any different, Sudsy old boy? . . . Don't make fun of Boston. Wait until you have had a taste of big league decrepitude.Meanwhile, good luck. Treat our team well. Treat it better than we did. It lasted only through 82 consecutive seasons in Boston"
Kaese knew whereof he wrote.
Over 82 years, the Braves had treated their fans to some lasting memories as the oldest continuously operating pro sports franchise in America. In 1871, the team won the first league game in professional baseball history and, by 1901, when the Red Sox were established across town, they had won 12 pennants. In 1914, a team nicknamed "The Miracle Braves" scored what was later judged as the biggest sports upset in the first half of the 20th century, rising from last place on the Fourth of July to overtake the favored New York Giants for the National League pennant, before whipping the A's in four straight to win the World Series.
In 1915, the team constructed Braves Field on the site of what had once been a golf course and, at the time, it was the largest baseball stadium ever built. In 1947, the Braves help create The Jimmy Fund, a unique team-approach to helping kids with cancer. In 1948, the team attracted a record 1,455,439 fans to Braves Field as the won its first National League pennant in 34 years.
In 1951, a 20-year-od left-hander named Chet Nichols, who had been a star high school pitcher in Pawtucket, had the best earned-run average in the National League, and would have been rookie-of-the-year except for another youngster named Willie Mays.
But there also had been so many bad memories along the way. After the 1914 miracle, there was a three-decade malaise, when the Braves' won-lost record topped .500 only five times through 1945. The low point came in 1935 when the team lost 115 of the 154 games. Hall of Famer Bill McKechnie managed that team and others through most of the 1930s, a team so bad that he was named manager-of-the-year in 1937 for leading the Braves to a fifth-place finish, 16 games out of first.
During its decades-long slump, the Braves brought in stars, some of them living legends such as Jim Thorpe in 1919 and Babe Ruth in 1935, all of them well past their prime. They signed a DiMaggio, not Joe or Dom but Vince who, as a hitter, proceeded to lead the National League in strikeouts six times. The team even had trouble settling on a permanent nickname, trying the Red Stockings, the Beaneaters, the Doves, the Rustlers, and the Bees in addition to the Braves.
After their 1948 pennant, the Braves again slumped badly, to fourth-place finishes the following three seasons and a disastrous seventh-place fall in 1952, when they drew only 281,278 fans. The cross-town Red Sox fared little better on the field that year with a sixth-place finish, but they drew 1,115,750 to Fenway Park, and there seemed little doubt about which team ruled Boston.
After the '52 season, there were some ominous messages coming out of the Braves camp. Charlie Grimm, the manager, in an interview for a 1953 preseason magazine, tried to fend off rumors about a Braves move: "We are not moving to Milwaukee or any other place. We're staying right here in Boston," he protested, then asked rhetorically, "What's wrong with Boston that a hustling, winning ballclub wouldn't cure?"
Then there was an ironic letter sent by Braves business director Joseph F. Cairnes to sports agent Art Flynn that was discovered in the Barry Halper Collection when those artifacts were sold at auction by Sotheby's four years ago. In his February 1952 letter, Cairnes described the construction of a new stadium in Milwaukee for the Braves' minor-league affiliate, the Brewers, and predicted that the new ballpark "will have a major league club within a few years."
Because of the suddenness of the Braves move, what had appeared to be a forgettable end to the 1952 season suddenly turned in an accidentally memorable one, as fans and historians would later reconstruct it. The Sept. 28 game, a 5-5 tie at Brooklyn's Ebbetts Field, turned into the last game the team would play as Braves from Boston. A game the previous day, became the last ever Boston Braves win, with a young third baseman named Eddie Mathews clouting a homer. The Sept. 21 game, an 11-6 loss to the Dodgers, became the last regular-season game played at Braves Field, and the Sept. 14 game against the Cubs became the Braves' final victory at their home park, with Central Falls native Max Surkont pitching a shutout.
To change the team's identity all that had to be done was replace the "B" on their caps with an "M"as Sisti had suggested to the TV commercial crew. The rest of the uniforms remained the same.
For the most part, the relocation was a big success, especially from a Milwaukee fan's point of view. The Braves moved up to second place behind the Dodgers in '53, and led both leagues in attendance -- the 1,826,397 fans who flocked to County Stadium setting a National League record. That figure passed the 2-million mark a year later and, by 1957, the Braves -- of Milwaukee -- had won a National League pennant and beaten the Yankees in the World Series. Today, of course, the Braves are based in Atlanta.
Braves Field was demolished in 1959 to make way for Boston University's football field. Now, only remnants of the old administration building and a section of the right field stands remain, incorporated into the football field for a school that no longer plays football. Spahn's restaurant became a diner by another name for a while, then was the site of a muffler shop. Sisti wrapped up his career with two years in Milwaukee, Pafko with seven seasons, and Spahn spent 13 years there en route to Cooperstown.
Altison and Bob Brady are among the nucleus of fans who have renewed the memories of Boston's Braves during the past 11 years through a uniquely successful historical association. But even they know that the memories may someday fade away.
Brady, who produces the association's magnificent newsletter, still collects baseball cards, but some of the new ones bring a dose of reality and change. "It was nice that the Flair Greats set included two legends identified among Boston's best, Spahn on card 41 with a "B" on his cap and King Kelly on card 94 as a member of the Boston Beaneaters," Brady says. But some of the other new cards in his collection picture the next generation of the old Braves family -- like Keith Surkont, Max's son; Roger Salkeld, whose father Bill was a catcher for the Braves 1948 pennant winners; Randy St. Claire, whose father Ebba set a record for catchers by taking part in three double plays in a single game for the 1951 Braves.
Altison, the association's business manager and the driving force behind its success, wonders how long the memories can last. The roster of former Boston Braves players has shrunk over the years to just 62 who wore the "B" on their caps. And the youngest of them, pitcher Gene Conley, is 72.
And Altison saw other worrisome signs during the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park, when the top players in baseball's history were saluted, Spahn among them. "I couldn't believe that when they introduced Spahn that night, someone had put a cap with an 'M' on his head instead of one with a 'B,' " Altison said, "and in Boston, no less."
