The Milwaukee Post

April 6, 2018 • Milwaukee County Post • 11 'Home of the Braves' explores who's to blame for team's exit from Milwaukee SPORTS By NICHOLAS DETTMANN Conley News Service MILWAUKEE — When it comes to the Milwaukee Braves' departure, whose fault was it? Milwaukee County's? The franchise's? The fans' fault? Patrick Steele's book, "Home of the Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee," hopes to answer those questions that still simmer in the minds of baseball fans in Milwaukee and throughout Wisconsin a half-century later, while also providing a different perspective on what went down ending with the Braves leaving Milwaukee for Atlanta in 1965. Steele, softball coach for Kettle Moraine Lutheran in Jackson from 2011-13, wrote the book, published by the University of Wisconsin Press and released Tuesday, for several reasons. "The idea for the book first originated when Bob Buege first put his book out," Steele said. Buege wrote "The Milwaukee Braves: A Baseball Eulogy" and it was released in 1988. Buege also wrote the foreword for Steele's book. "He covers a lot of the on-bases stuff, but he never really spent a lot of time on the reasons of why (the Braves) left and that opened up a lot of curiosi- ties for me," Steele said. "Since then, I've been try- ing to answer that ques- tion: Why did they leave?" Steele's reasons for writ- ing the book also include a p e r s o n a l touch. For one, he's an avid baseball fan. Steele also saw the heartbreak it caused his mom, Kathye, a die-hard supporter of the franchise when it was in Milwaukee. "She never understood why they left," Patrick said. "I want to tell the story for her and for fans like her, explain to them, 'Hey, it wasn't your fault.' Because in many ways the Atlanta Braves organiza- tion still blames the fans of Milwaukee for them leav- ing, which I think is really unfair." He added, "It had to be more than greedy owners. There had to be more." Why did the Braves leave Milwaukee? Through nearly five years of research, Steele found there were a slew of reasons and very few of them had to do with the fans. The ownership group in the 1960s, led by William Bartholomay, who pur- chased the franchise from Lou Perini in 1962, said attendance was the factor. "Attendance was down all over baseball," Steele said. When asked whom he thought was to blame for the Braves leaving for Atlanta, Steele said more of the blame should be put on Milwaukee County and the Braves franchise, not the fans. He acknowledged the fans had a small part, but not as big as they've been made out to be. In the appendix, a line chart shows the attendance data of the first 13 years of existence of the Milwaukee Braves, the Atlanta Braves and the Milwaukee Brewers. According to the data in the book, the Atlanta Braves drew fewer fans than the Brewers, which included a strike in 1981. The Atlanta Braves did- n't pass the Milwaukee Braves in total attendance until season 13. "While this does not demonstrate profitability of the Braves or the Brewers, it does show that Milwaukee was not the bad baseball town that the Braves ownership claimed when the team left Wisconsin," Steele wrote. It was a shock to Steele after his research and writ- ing to see where the blame was being put and where it wasn't. "The biggest kind of wow moment was the hos- tility from the county, par- ticularly the supervisors," Steele said. "They made the Braves economically inviable in Milwaukee and that's what was shocking to me," he said. He wrote extensively about the constant changes Milwaukee County officials made to the lease agree- ment with Milwaukee County Stadium. For exam- ple, the Braves were responsible for the upkeep of the parking lot, while the county kept the rev- enue. "When I read in multiple sources in their own docu- ments that the Braves paid more to use County Stadium than any other team in Major League Baseball paid to use their facilities," Steele said, "that was a giant red flag." Milwaukee a victim of its own success with Braves In his epilogue, Steele writes a section titled "So who lost? Everybody lost." "As I was doing the book, I got sympathetic to the organization in some ways with the way they were treated," Steele said. The Braves were 92-62 in their first season in Milwaukee in 1953 and drew a then-record 1.8 mil- lion fans, an unfathomable figure by that era's stan- dards. Four years later, the Braves celebrated a World Series title and a National League pennant the follow- ing season. Attendance fig- ures were beyond compre- hension, but those num- bers settled down. Not helping the matter was the rise of the Green Bay Packers and the Vince Lombardi years. Steele said the Chicago- based ownership group overpaid for the organiza- tion, which also hurt the Braves' future in Milwaukee. Also at that time, expan- sion started to take place in baseball, including adding a team in Minneapolis-St. Paul. And Atlanta dangled a tempting offer, much like the one Milwaukee did to get the Braves out of Boston, a new stadium and an eager fan base. "If it wouldn't have been Atlanta, it would've been somewhere else," Steele said. Steele interviewed Bartholomay for the book. "He said, 'Look, when the club was in Milwaukee, my wife and I had a place out in Lake Geneva,'" Steele said. "'For us to go to a ballgame, it was get in the car, drive over to County Stadium, get up to the suite, it was 40 minutes. "To catch a game in Atlanta, I had to go to the airport, get on a plane, fly down to Atlanta, stay down there for a couple days. It wasn't convenient.'" "I don't think they bought the team solely with the idea of moving it. The moving option becomes inevitable by 1963." Steele said he believes if the ownership sold the team to local interests, the Braves may have never left. He also believes if the team didn't shatter attendance records at the beginning, that would've changed the perspective of the team's viability in Milwaukee. "They wanted to be own- ers and the only option was to go somewhere else where they could get a better sta- dium deal," Steele said. Steele Submitted photo "Home of the Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee" by Patrick Steele addresses the question: Why did the Braves leave Milwaukee? Author takes it easy on the fans

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