The Rise and Fall of America's Most Fought-Over Baseball Team: The Milwaukee Braves

Thanks for watching all the way through. Subscribe below    / @fadedstandings   Wisconsin sued the National League in 1965, won every part of the case at trial, and lost the Braves anyway. The statute it sued under dated from 1893 and said only that any combination in the nature of a conspiracy in restraint of trade was illegal. Baseball's lawyers argued that a 1921 amendment about commodities narrowed it. That failed. On the evening of the thirteenth of April, 1966, after a thirty-eight day trial, Judge Elmer Roller of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court handed down a hundred and seventy-six page decision. He found the violation, levied five thousand dollars against each of the eleven defendants, and ordered the National League either to place an expansion club in Milwaukee by the middle of May or to send the Braves back for their 1966 home games. Then he suspended his own judgment. On the twenty-seventh of July, 1966, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed him four votes to three and sent the case back to be dismissed. It did not overturn a single finding of fact. It assumed, without deciding, that the National League had broken Wisconsin law, and struck the judgment down on power alone. The majority split on why and said so in the opinion: some held that the silence of Congress had left these decisions to the sport itself, others that a league across eight states can only be regulated by one authority. Underneath both was the same problem. Applying Wisconsin law amounted, in the court's words, to requiring a national league to admit a new member, and returning the Braves without expansion would only have preserved the monopoly at Atlanta's expense. Wisconsin had a law it could win under. It did not have a remedy that stayed inside Wisconsin. Milwaukee had gone without a major league club since 1901. The county built County Stadium for a minor league tenant, and only after it was finished did the National League owners vote, on the eighteenth of March, 1953, to move a Boston franchise that had drawn 281,278 people the season before. The club set a National League attendance record that first summer, led the league in attendance in each of its first six years, and in 1954 became the first National League club to draw two million in a season, which it then did four years running. It won the 1957 World Series and never once finished a Wisconsin season with more losses than wins. The decline happened in the seats and not in the standings. Attendance fell every year from 1958 while the club kept winning, and 1962 was the first season in Milwaukee under a million. That November, Lou Perini sold the club to a group of investors from Chicago, none of whom lived in Wisconsin. In October 1964 the board voted to go. The National League approved the move for 1966 and not for 1965, because Milwaukee County held a lease on County Stadium running to the end of 1965 and refused five hundred thousand dollars to tear it up. That is why there was a lame-duck season: thirty-six season tickets sold, nine hundred and thirteen people in the building on the fourth of May and 555,584 for the year. The case was never about whether Milwaukee deserved the club. Milwaukee County and a local company both applied to both leagues for an expansion franchise and both were refused. That refusal, not the relocation, was the act the state took to court: ten clubs agreeing among themselves that a city of three quarters of a million people would not have a replacement. On that same evening in April 1966, seven hundred miles south, the club was playing the second game in the history of Atlanta Stadium. Pittsburgh won six to nothing in front of 12,721 people, one night after 50,671 had watched the opener. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in December 1966. Milwaukee got baseball back four years later and got it from a court, though not that one: in 1970 a federal bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the Seattle Pilots to a group from Milwaukee. The franchise that left plays today as the Atlanta Braves. Built from the court record, contemporary wire copy and box scores. Sources State of Wisconsin v. Milwaukee Braves, Inc., 31 Wis. 2d 699, 144 N.W.2d 1 (1966), full opinion of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, decided 27 July 1966 Associated Press wire report on Judge Roller's ruling, published 14 April 1966, on the fine, the trial, the deadline given to the National League and the response of the commissioner of baseball Baseball-Reference box scores, County Stadium 1953 and 1964, Atlanta Stadium April 1966; contemporary reporting on the 1962 sale and the 1964 board vote Marquette University Law School faculty blog, on the case and on Braves attendance by season; Baseball-Reference and Baseball Almanac, National League attendance by club and season, 1947 to 1966 Society for American Baseball Research, on the 1965 season, County Stadium and the sale of the Seattle Pilots