When Milwaukee auditioned to return to the big leagues
When you want to send a message, it doesn’t hurt to have 51,144 people behind you.
Less than two years after Milwaukee lost the Braves, a group determined to bring baseball back to the city talked the Chicago White Sox and Minnesota Twins into playing an exhibition game at County Stadium.
The aim of the game, played 50 years ago this month, was to show that Milwaukee was still major league.
“This exhibition game is an important part of our continuing program to re-establish Milwaukee as a major-league city,” Allan H. “Bud” Selig, the then-32year-old president of Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club Inc., said in an April 9, 1967, story in The Milwaukee Journal announcing the game.
Tickets went on sale for the Twins-White Sox game, scheduled for July 24, 1967, on May 11. By July 14, 26,000 tickets had been sold; by the morning of the game, the Sentinel reported on its front page on July 24, sales had reached more than 43,000.
Actually, attendance clocked in at 51,144 — more than County Stadium’s listed capacity of 48,011. Some of the overflow crowd stood in roped-off parts of the warning track in the outfield.
“Food and drink hawkers had a field day,” the Sentinel reported in its front-page story the next day. “But even then, some spectators complained that the beer wasn’t coming fast enough. Some beer vendors were unloading entire cases at a single stop.”
Catering to the hometown crowd, the White Sox started pitcher Don McMahon, a veteran reliever who was a rookie sensation with the Milwaukee Braves in 1957.
Other participants in the game with Milwaukee baseball ties included White Sox manager Eddie Stanky, who was a star with the minor-league Brewers in 1942, and Twins coach Billy Martin, who played briefly for the Braves in 1961.
The lineups also included several future Hall of Famers — the Twins’ Harmon Killebrew and Rod Carew, the White Sox’s Hoyt Wilhelm — and several future Brewers, including the Twins’ Sandy Valdespino, Rich Rollins, Carew and Manager Cal Ermer, and the Sox’s Ken Berry and Jerry McNertney.
The Twins won, 2-1, and the standing-room “seating” in the outfield played a factor. Balls hit into the crowd were ruled ground-rule doubles and figured in two of the three runs.
But the game played on the field wasn’t as important as the fact that there a game on the field.
“It’s the right place and the wrong teams,” Margaret Southcott of Oconomowoc told the Sentinel’s Mervin C. Nelson in a second front-page story on July 25. “But it’s still baseball.”
Official baseballdom was impressed. “This is fantastic,” Twins owner Calvin Griffith said to The Journal’s Bob Wolf in a July 25 story. “They’re just crying for baseball here.” Milwaukee would have to cry a little longer. Inspired by the strong turnout, the White Sox announced on Oct. 30 that they would play 10 games at County Stadium in 1968. White Sox owner Arthur Allyn shot down rumors the team might move here: “We are not moving to Milwaukee — now or ever,” he told the Sentinel’s Lou Chapman in a front-page story Oct. 31.
In 1968, Selig’s group made a formal bid for a National League expansion team but was rejected. The White Sox returned for 11 games in 1969, but it wasn’t the same.
It took the sale of the Seattle Pilots in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, just days before the start of the 1970 season, to bring baseball back for good.
The headline atop the April 1, 1970, Journal read: “We’re Big League Again!”