Think the Rays’ proposed split between Montreal, Florida is odd? The White Sox did it with Milwaukee 50 years ago

Chicago Tribune (TNS)

What’s happening now with the Tampa Bay Rays bears a chilling resemblance to a low period in White Sox history.

Attendance is so poor at rundown Tropicana Field — the Rays rank next to last (Marlins are last) with an average of 14,546, almost identical to their 2018 numbers — that Major League Baseball’s allowing the club to explore splitting games between St. Petersburg, Fla., and Montreal, the former home of Expos.

Folks are calling this proposed hybrid the “ExRays.”

During their dalliance with the Milwaukee market in 1968-69, the Sox didn’t have such a cool nickname. But they could relate to the circumstances.

Fifty years ago, the Sox were staging “home” games at Milwaukee County Stadium for the second season in a row and, mired in the fifth straight year of declining attendance numbers, they were flirting with the idea of moving there permanently.

In fact, a sort of odd love triangle between Chicago, Milwaukee and Seattle played out between 1967 and 1975.

But you have to go back a little bit further to set the table for all this.

Chicago businessmen William Bartholomay and Tom Reynolds bought the Milwaukee Braves in 1962 from Lou Perini, and, as had been long rumored and feared, the new owners moved the club to Atlanta in 1966.

After the impending move was announced in 1965, former Braves shareholder Bud Selig formed an ownership group to either lure a team to Milwaukee or win an expansion franchise between ’65 and ’70.

Selig lost out to Seattle (the Pilots) and Kansas City (the Royals) when Major League Baseball granted expansion franchises during the 1967 winter meetings, but he already had other irons in the fire.

Selig and his group of investors scheduled an exhibition between the Sox, owned by brothers Arthur and John Allyn, and the Twins on July 24, 1967. The experiment drew 51,144 fans — more than four times the average attendance of about 12,000 at Sox Park that season, and these games counted.

“(Arthur) Allyn, his eyes lit up,” said Rich Lindberg, an author and White Sox historian. “He really saw the opportunity there that, wow, if Chicago can’t support this team, Milwaukee will.”

The Sox had become a financial burden for Arthur Allyn, the principal owner at the time.

“By 1965, Allyn had exhausted all of his tax write-offs and benefits” from owning the team, Lindberg said.

To make matters worse, Bill Veeck had gutted the farm system before selling the Sox to the Allyns in 1961. Sure, Veeck’s trades made the Sox contenders for a while, but the clock was ticking on their roster.

In 1966, attendance at Sox Park dropped below 1 million for the first time since 1958 and kept falling each season. Across town, the Cubs became the hot ticket behind a third-place finish in the National League in 1967 and emerging stars Fergie Jenkins, Ernie Banks and Ron Santo.

Lindberg said that one of his sources, “John Justin Smith, who was a sportswriter for the Chicago Daily News, had looked at Art Allyn’s books (in the late ’60s) and he said that Allyn was floating in a sea of red ink.”

Rich Lindberg, author and White Sox historian

MLB,

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Greg Anderson was supposed to be bound for Orlando, Florida, and the MLS player combine in his role as vice president of soccer operations for the Vancouver Whitecaps. He was hours from going to the airport when a phone call changed his itinerary.

Instead of east, Anderson headed west. First, he landed in South Korea to meet with the parents of promising 22-year-old midfielder Inbeom Hwang. Then it was even further west to Dubai to meet with Hwang himself and help finalize a deal to bring him to MLS.

By the time Anderson caught a flight from Dubai to Toronto and then back to Vancouver, he’d gone around the world to land the Whitecaps a designated player.

It was a worthwhile effort. But it’s also a rare story.

Despite the efforts of Anderson and counterparts around the league, MLS has yet to make extensive inroads into the Asian market to convince top talent that playing in North America can be the next move in their careers.

“There are certainly players there, national team level players, who could come in and start and play in our league,” said Chris Henderson, Seattle’s vice president of soccer. “I think the aspirations, at least in Japan, for those players is to go to Europe. Korea, they want to go to Europe. Because that is what’s on TV and they’re seeing all the games at the highest level.”

Currently only three internationals from Japan or South Korea are playing in MLS. Hwang and Seattle’s Kim Kee-hee are the South Koreans, while Toronto’s Tsubasa Endoh was born and raised in Japan before moving to the U.S. following the Fukushima earthquake. Zachary Herivaux of New England and Ken Krolic of Montreal were both born in Japan but mostly grew up elsewhere.

MLS has been highly successful recruiting players out of South America and it’s starting to shed the reputation of being a retirement league for Europeans.

But Asia, and specifically Japan and South Korea, are markets producing solid international players, yet MLS has mostly been an afterthought there.

That could be changing.

Hwang believes there are a growing number of players considering MLS as a potential springboard to opportunities in Europe.

“Obviously my ultimate goal is to go to a higher level and go to one of the European league and I knew that to achieve that I have to have many eyes watching me playing and I thought that MLS is where there are many people watching,” Hwang said through an interpreter. “There are many eyes, scouters are watching the games. I thought it would be right fit, right league to achieve my goal.”

Washington’s salary-cap crunch is likely to send Connolly into the market, where he could get a big payday and a bigger role with another team.

Young’ins

A handful of intriguing players under age 27 were not tendered qualifying offers as restricted free agents and are now free to sign with any team. That list includes 24-year-old forward Ryan Hartman, who has been traded three times in 18 months, 25-year-old defenseman Derrick Pouliot and underachieving 2013 firstround picks Kirby Reichel and Curtis Lazar.

So, based on those factors and the success of the Milwaukee exhibition game, it didn’t exactly take arm twisting to get Allyn to schedule nine Sox games at County Stadium in ’68 and another 11 in ’69 — in both cases a game against each American League rival.

The Chicago Tribune’s “In the Wake of the News” columnist David Condon wrote in November 1967, days after the Sox announced their plans to play in Milwaukee in ’68, “The move hardly is a credit to the world’s greatest sports city.”

The ’68 schedule attracted more than 264,000 fans to County Stadium.

That represented nearly a third of the more than 801,000 total combined home attendance.

In ’69, more than 198,000 fans showed up — again, a third of the Sox’s total attendance (just over 593,000).

Tribune writer Robert Markus questioned the lack of lack of paying customers at Sox Park in ’69: “Is baseball dead on the South Side?”

During this trial balloon with Milwaukee, “the fans were given the explanation that we are doing this to help Milwaukee to either get an expansion team or another major-league team,” Lindberg said.

“So this was the Kool-Aid Art Allyn wanted White Sox fans to drink. But clearly it was the White Sox attempt to test the waters.”

That summer of ’69, Selig and partner Edmund B. Fitzgerald (yes, he’s related to the namesake of Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”) ramped up negotiations with Arthur Allyn to buy the team.

“A price of $12,400,000 to $12,500,000, which included the purchase of the White Sox ball park, was discussed,” according to the tax lawsuit Selig filed against federal government in 1983. “The negotiations fell through in August when Allyn’s brother, a 50% shareholder, determined that he did not want to sell.”

Ultimately, John Allyn, who was more a sports aficionado than business-minded brother, bought out Arthur’s half to save the team from moving.

Ironically, the Seattle Pilots went bankrupt in their one season in 1969, and Selig snapped them up for $10.8 million, moved them to Milwaukee and renamed them the Brewers.

“The way I heard it from John Allyn’s son was that Art and John became very bitter enemies and it was a very acrimonious situation,” Lindberg said. “When the sale occurred (between the brothers), Art apparently sold to John at a cheaper rate than what Selig was going to pay.”

It’s poetic that Selig’s new team won their first game against — you guessed it — the Sox on April 11, 1970.

Later Seattle, on its own hunt to bring back baseball, trained its eye on the Sox and was ready to buy out John Allyn in 1975 and relocate the team.

Instead, John Allyn unloaded the team on Bill Veeck, who had sold the Allyn brothers the team in 1961 when Veeck fell ill.

Though John Allyn had to give up the team, it was the second time he managed to keep the Sox on the South Side: once by buying controlling interest from his brother, and again by selling it to Veeck.

“(John Allyn) loved the team, he loved baseball, “Lindberg said. “He is the unsung hero in terms of saving the White Sox for the city of Chicago, in my mind,” Lindberg said.

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