Competitive boosterism: how Milwaukee lost the Braves. (transfer of baseball franchise to Atlanta)

Baseball seasons of the mid-1990s, with a full lineup of striking players, rapacious owners, and disaffected fans, surely set records for most repetitions of the familiar refrain: "Baseball is a business, not a sport." The contemporary sports page came to resemble the financial page, lavishing attention once reserved for pitching and pennants onto the minutiae of labor relations and antitrust law. Each year sportswriters and fans seemed to rediscover that big money had turned all big-league sports into big business. What still went unnoticed by baseball writers, however, was that while the national pastime mutated from sport into business, a much larger sector of the U.S. political economy shifted in the opposite direction. What used to be the business of urban economic development became the sport of competitive boosterism - and major-league baseball was one of the most coveted trophies to be won.(1)

Cities themselves played a cutthroat game in which competition for baseball franchises might be considered the ultimate World Series. That game was competitive boosterism: the active participation of local elites in luring trade, industry and investment to their own cities from elsewhere, in a zero-sum Darwinian contest. Cities of the "lean-and-mean" 1990s coped with fiscal austerity and slow growth by seeking regional redistribution of jobs and capital, offering to private investors tax breaks, revenue bonds, speculative buildings, research parks, redevelopment aid, and other inducements. On the payrolls of states and cities across North America were specialists in "economic development" - players in the game of competitive boosterism, the "last entrepreneurs" fighting a "new civil war."(2)

Competition for economic development is systemic to the political economy of U.S. cities. Likewise, boosterism, or "the promotion of economic enterprise by organized public and private groups within urban communities," as the historian Charles Glaab defined it, runs deep in the American grain. James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and Sinclair Lewis created booster archetypes in their novels, and dozens of historians have chronicled the activities of land speculators, railroad boomers, and town promoters. Nor has the competitive side of boosterism suffered from historical neglect: Daniel Boorstin, Richard Wade, and Paul Wallace Gates described lively nineteenth-century contests among frontier towns for rail depots, posh hotels, county seats, and state capitals. Over the last thirty years, however, not even a Japanese automobile factory could match a major-league baseball franchise in prestige for the home community - and in the lengths to which boosters would go to procure it.(3)

Civic leaders indifferent to shuttered factories, jobless workers, and fleeing firms often spared no effort to retain a major-league baseball franchise. "Major League City" is the arch-cachet of American cityhood, which presumably brings "civic pride" and "economic growth," according to the historian James Edward Miller. But the baseball economist Andrew Zimbalist found that while "a city reaps unquantifiable benefits from having a team," it is also true that "cities that have teams and lose them are likely to encounter an image problem." Politicians faced tremendous pressure to hold onto the hometown favorites, regardless of their true economic worth. "Big league owners know that by threatening to move, they can extort any concessions they want from their cities," sports columnist Allen Barra noted recently. "I'll bleed and I'll die," vowed Governor Jim Thompson of Illinois in 1988, "before I let the [White] Sox leave Chicago." Owners have successfully exploited that sort of leverage to obtain magnificent new stadiums and generous leases from anxious communities, not least in Chicago.(4)

In a 1995 interview, American League president Gene Budig underscored the power of major-league baseball to force cities to play competitive boosterism, and he reminded them of the stakes:

I believe the general public realizes the importance of major league baseball to their communities. It is clearly in the best interests of those communities to protect those franchises. They are important to economic development as well as quality of life . . . To lose a major league baseball franchise would send an unfortunate message to business and industry that would have interest in possible location [in those cities].

Faced with this kind of threat, elected officials were highly vulnerable to what Forbes called "big-league blackmail," and what Sports Illustrated denounced as the "recurring scam" by which "plutocratic extortioners" who happen to own teams "blackmail communities into meeting their demands - or else."(5)

Cities struggling with "the sports franchise relocation issue" found themselves trapped in an urban arms race which forced them to defend their major-league status with plush stadiums and subsidies. Economic development specialists doubted the wisdom of investing "tax dollars and emotions" in sports as a development strategy, especially when compared to alternative investments in infrastructure, education, or manufacturing employment. Charles Euchner's indictment of the "cannibalistic struggles for sports franchises" called for federal intervention, and Kenneth Shropshire suggested that sports-minded cities caught in this "surrogate warfare" should question "whether the huge expenditures needed to be perceived as 'big-league' are worthwhile." Indeed, economists find little rational basis for the half-billion dollars in annual net tax transfers to professional sport entities. Yet baseball bidding wars escalated in the 1990s - even though, as economist Benjamin Okner found decades ago, precious public dollars flow into the pockets of some of the nation's wealthiest private individuals. Dean Baim confirmed that sports subsidies constitute highly regressive income transfers from poor urban taxpayers to a few millionaire owners and players. How did American cities get mired in this expensive and unproductive game?(6)

Opening Day of baseball's competitive boosterism season came on 21 October 1964 - the day the Milwaukee Braves baseball team announced their move to Atlanta. The importance of this episode over other traumatic sports team movements was emphasized by the broadcaster Howard Cosell, who testified before Congress that transferring the Braves franchise was the first and worst example of what he called "the rape of the cities," or the abuse of monopoly power by baseball owners exempt from antitrust law. Bill Veeck, another noted baseball expert, complained at the time that "the Milwaukee situation has disgusted the entire nation." Of course, other cities lost baseball teams before Milwaukee; but forsaken fans of the Boston Braves, the St. Louis Browns, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, and the Washington Senators could always transfer their allegiance to another major-league team in town. That may have been paltry consolation, but Milwaukee fans were left with no major-league team in any sport. For the first time in modern history, a city was stripped altogether of its major-league status.(7)

I

The Boston Braves were a charter member of baseball's National League, organized in 1876, but the franchise enjoyed only sporadic success. Attendance topped one million only three times in Boston, and in 1952 it fell to 282,000. Owner Lou Perini, a millionaire construction tycoon, took pride in his "sound business approach" to baseball. "Lou did not become a successful contractor by letting the grass grow under his feet," admired John Gilloly of the Boston Record, with unwitting prescience. The Braves lost over $1 million in 1950-52, and even Bostonians admitted that the "the worst franchise in the history of baseball" deserved a better fate. "One of these days the Braves may go on the road," warned a local reporter, "and never come back." But no team had moved in half a century, so leaving Boston would take an audacious act.(8)

As owner of the minor-league Milwaukee franchise, Perini had the exclusive territorial rights to that city under baseball's monopolistic operating agreement. In 1952, boosters led by Clifford Randall of the Greater Milwaukee Committee and Alvin Monroe of the Milwaukee Association of Commerce pressured Perini to permit a transfer of the struggling St. Louis Browns franchise to their city. Russ Lynch of the Milwaukee Journal kept up a steady barrage of columns imploring Perini to let Milwaukee join the major leagues, and he testified before Congress for legislation to force baseball expansion. Meanwhile, Milwaukee County Stadium, built to host a minor-league team but expandable to major-league size, was reaching completion in 1953 after years of delay, thanks to the intercession of boosters William McGovern of the Wisconsin Telephone Company and brewery magnate Frederick Miller.(9)

Milwaukee boosters demanded that Perini let their city join the major leagues, flaying him in the press for blocking their aspirations. "You don't know all the letters, telegrams, and telephone calls I've been getting on this thing," Perini complained to fellow owners. After negotiating with Miller personally, Perini finally decided to head off other teams and move his own Boston Braves into Milwaukee's new stadium. Business Week called it "a desperation move" by a "floundering" franchise, but the Milwaukee Journal praised the "citizen initiative" of city boosters who "went out and got a big league team" for their city. The Association of Commerce gave "the greatest credit" to Frederick Miller and his businessmen-boosters. "My ambition is to make Milwaukee a sports center," vowed Miller, "and keep it that way." Randall predicted that the Braves would be "the greatest psychological lift Milwaukee ever had," proving "that the community can be as great as its citizens want it to be."(10)

Sportswriters marveled at the "adulation and acclaim" heaped on the Braves from the moment they reached Milwaukee. The strangers from Boston were greeted by 12,000 ecstatic fans at the train station, and 60,000 more cheered during a welcome parade through downtown. "I don't think any city has ever gone as crazy over a baseball team," recalled third baseman Eddie Mathews, and teammate Warren Spahn agreed that the Braves attracted "the biggest and most worshipful following in the majors." Perini's gamble paid off handsomely: the Milwaukee Braves drew over 1.8 million fans in their first season, setting league records in attendance and profits. Braves fans showered the players with $100,000 in free cars, televisions, clothing, sausage, and fine Wisconsin cheese. Sportswriters dubbed County Stadium "an insane asylum with bases," where fans behaved like "children attending their first circus." Perhaps the highest compliment anyone could bestow came from a Braves fan who told LIFE magazine: "This is the greatest thing that has happened to Milwaukee since beer."(11)

The Association of Commerce estimated that the Braves attracted nearly $5 million in new business to Milwaukee in 1953. The intangible benefits of major-league status were far greater: the Braves imparted "a new spirit of civic enthusiasm," and the team "brought success to civic enterprise far removed from baseball," according to one study. American City reported that "the Braves have infused an electric vitality into this city," and Milwaukee boosters exulted in their new-found urban competitiveness. "Milwaukee is big-league in every respect, not only in sports, but in the much bigger league of industry and commerce," beamed local manufacturer Tom Emerson. The Association of Commerce started a "Team Up With Big League Milwaukee" membership drive, and the Greater Milwaukee Committee adopted a new slogan: "Let's be big league all the way." A prominent brewery executive considered the Braves to be "the symbol that we've become a big city," and a Wisconsin bank president commented: "I can't think of one business or industry which hasn't been directly or indirectly helped by the coming of major-league baseball." Local post offices proudly stamped outgoing mail "Home of the Braves," proclaiming Milwaukee's new major-league status.(12)

Sports Illustrated put the "Milwaukee Miracle" on the cover of its inaugural issue in 1954, and the Braves kept setting higher attendance records, peaking at 2.2 million in the championship season of 1957. Braves slugger Henry Aaron would play some 22 seasons in the major leagues, but he considered 1957 to be "the best year of baseball that any city ever had." Capping it all was a World Series victory over the New York Yankees. The ensuing civic euphoria seemed like "fantasia reit sauerbraten und gemuetlichkeit." Milwaukeeans rejoiced in triumph over New Yorkers who called their town "bush league." The victory "cured a civic inferiority complex," according to TIME. Milwaukee erupted in "pandemonium," "bedlam," and "a wild baseball bender," a bigger party than V-E Day and V-J …