Forty-five years ago this season, the Chicago White Sox moved some of their games northward along Interstate 94.

Understanding why requires some history. Recall that the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953, and were a hit for several seasons, winning the 1957 World Series and the 1958 National League pennant.

And then interest dwindled, ownership changed, and the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta.

Two seasons later, the White Sox were drawing poorly at Comiskey Park. And that’s where Hardball Times picks up the story:

The franchise shift was especially hard on one minority owner, a car dealer by the name of Bud Selig. A longtime fan of the minor league Brewers, he was a frequent visitor to old Borchert Field, where the locals had witnessed baseball since 1888. He had also followed the White Sox and Cubs via radio. The arrival of the Braves when he was 18 years old had been a dream come true. Their departure (when he was 31) was his worst nightmare. But if Milwaukee had once been a great baseball town, it could be again. Of course, to prove it, the city needed another team.

When it first appeared that the Braves were Atlanta-bound, Selig started recruiting local movers and shakers (such as the CEO of Schlitz and a local federal judge) and organized the opposition. He kept his organization intact after the Braves’ move was a done deal. On July 30, 1965, with two months left in Milwaukee Braves history, he named his group Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club, Inc. Whether he was paying tribute to the minor league team of his youth or indulging in prophecy is open to debate. But Selig’s group needed to work fast because in 1967, both major leagues voted to expand.

On July 24, 1967, Selig’s group staged a Monday night exhibition game between the first-place (53-40) White Sox and the Twins. More than 51,000 fans turned out. Since County Stadium held 43,768 in those days, that was an achievement—especially for a game that didn’t count. It’s fair to say that most of the fans were local, as the White Sox and Twins fans had ample opportunities to see their own clubs play. Why would they bother to drive to Milwaukee to see an exhibition game? …

Selig also managed to persuade the White Sox to stage nine “home” games—not exhibition games—in Milwaukee in 1968. The White Sox were coming off a competitive year in 1967, having finished just three games behind the Red Sox in a four-team showdown that went into the final season of the weekend. The attendance, however, was 985,634, not exactly overwhelming for a pennant contender, so White Sox President Arthur Allyn agreed to the Selig plan.

Savvy baseball fans in Chicago might have remembered that the Dodgers had played “home” games in Jersey City in 1956 and 1957 right before they vacated Brooklyn. To the hard-core White Sox fan, the Milwaukee games must have been a worrisome development.

Also, during the late 1960s the Cubs were emerging from the doldrums and were getting more attention in the Chicago sports pages. In 1967, they drew 977,226, not too far behind the White Sox. In 1968 they surpassed the million mark (by just 43,409) for the first time since 1952. The trend continued in subsequent years. The Friendly Confines got more and more crowded; White Sox Park, “the Baseball Palace of the World” when it opened in 1910, now offered an overabundance of seats at popular prices.

The Milwaukee games served as a reminder to MLB that County Stadium was only 15 years old and ready and waiting for an expansion team. One can imagine Selig’s heartbreak on May 27, 1968, when the National League announced that Montreal and San Diego would join the league the following season. In the American League, Kansas City was pretty much a given since Charlie Finley’s move to Oakland had raised political hackles in Missouri. The other American League franchise was awarded to Seattle, but Selig would never have guessed then the key role the fledgling Pilots would play in his quest to land a team.

The 1968 White Sox won just one of their 10 Milwaukee games. That was on the field, though; in the seats, the Milwaukee games averaged three times what the White Sox were drawing at Comiskey Park. The difference was down to almost three times in 1969, but the ’69 Sox had a winning record in Milwaukee.

Selig’s group made an offer to purchase the White Sox. American League owners, however, didn’t want to repeat the National League experience of having no team in one of the two largest markets in the nation. New York had no National League team from 1958, the year the Brooklyn Dodgers went to Los Angeles and the New York Giants went to San Francisco, until 1961, the year before the expansion Mets opened their doors (and fell flat on their faces, but that’s another story). White Sox owner Arthyr Allyn sold the franchise to his brother, John, and more mediocrity ensued, until Bill Veeck purchased the Sox and entertaining mediocrity followed.

However, the story doesn’t end there, as you know:

The Seattle Pilots were in deep financial trouble after just one year of play. During spring training 1970, the courts were hashing out the team’s fate. The clincher came when the team filed for bankruptcy in federal court, thus rendering moot a lot of local maneuvering. Selig’s offer to buy the team and move it to Milwaukee was obviously in the best interests of the debtors.

On March 31, 1970 at 10:15 p.m., Selig got the phone call he’d been waiting for. The bankruptcy judge had approved of his purchase of the Pilots. The team equipment truck had left Arizona and gone only as far north as Utah. Now the driver knew to go east rather than west. Selig had one week to get ready for Opening Day in Milwaukee. In 1953, the Braves, lucky stiffs, had all of four weeks to get ready!

So from that point on, the possibility of the Chicago White Sox moving to Milwaukee shrank to zero. Had the team moved, it would have been interesting to see if it would have remained the White Sox or would have been changed to Brewers, as happened to the Pilots in 1970. The name “Pilots” was a good one for Seattle, as it incorporated the area’s links to aviation and seafaring. In fact, the team logo combined a pair of wings and a ship’s helm. Pilots wouldn’t have been totally inappropriate for Milwaukee, perched on the banks of Lake Michigan, but a more appropriate option was at hand. Brewers was as apt in 1970 as it was in 1901 and as it is today.

In a sense, the city of Milwaukee had come full circle. In 1902, after one year of operations, Milwaukee lost the Brewers to St. Louis; 68 years later, after one year of operations, Seattle lost the Pilots to Milwaukee.

Given the 1969 end-of-season rosters of the White Sox and the Pilots (they were, of course, the team Jim Bouton wrote about in Ball Four), it wouldn’t have made much difference, talent-wise, which team went to Milwaukee. The White Sox were fifth in the American League West at 68-94, and the Pilots were right behind them at 64-98.

In the short term, the difference in attendance at County Stadium and White Sox Park continued. With only a week to get ready, the Brewers still managed to pull in 37,237 for a Tuesday afternoon Opening Day on April 7, 1970. On the same day, the White Sox drew 11,473 for their opener against the Twins. That’s pitiful for Opening Day, but it looked positively robust compared to the crowd of 1,036 who witnessed the Brewers’ first game at White Sox Park a few days later.

For the 1970 season, the Sox drew a mere 495,355, their lowest total since 1942. The Brewers, meanwhile, drew 933,690 for the season. The Brewers tied with Kansas City for fourth place in the American League West with a 65-97 record. The White Sox were mired in the cellar with a 56-106 record.

As it turned out, that June 16, 1969 game between the Pilots and White Sox in Milwaukee provided a preview of Milwaukee’s home team the following season. With all signs indicating the White Sox would be heading north, it must have been quite a surprise to find deliverance via the Pilots flying east.

It is interesting to contemplate how things might have been different in Milwaukee in the early ’70s. The early- and mid-’70s Brewers teams were bad, filled with has-beens, never-would-bes, and players too young to be stars, such as shortstop Robin Yount, thrown into the lineup at 18. As Hardball Times pointed out, the 1970 Brewers looked a lot like the 1969 Pilots, and that wasn’t good. The Pilots had a handful of barely recognizable players, and then only years later:

• First baseman Mike Hegan, a second-generation big leaguer who played on the Oakland A’s teams that won three consecutive World Series, then went on to call Brewers games on TV for years.
• Pitcher Gene Brabender, only because he was the Brewers’ first Wisconsinite, a native of Black Earth. (Whose high school fight song, according to Bouton, started with “Black Earth, we love you, hurrah for the rocks and the dirt …”)
• Pitcher Marty Pattin, whose last few seasons were with the Kansas City Royals, including a World Series appearance in his last season. (If you’ve read Ball Four, you know the other reason Pattin was famous. Two words: Donald Duck.)
• Pitcher Mike Marshall, who went on to become one of the first closers. Marshall went 15–12 with 21 saves and a 2.42 ERA for the 1974 Dodgers, pitching 208 innings in relief, and saved 32 games for the 1979 Minnesota Twins.
• Catcher Larry Haney, who went on to become the Brewers’ bullpen coach.

The White Sox became a brief contender later in the ’70s when Veeck purchased them and signed good players to one-year deals, all he could afford, under his so-called “rent-a-superstar” program. Veeck promoted the hell out of the White Sox, including the famous exploding scoreboard, and hired Harry Caray to be his announcer. None of that would have happened without Veeck. (Then again, Disco Demolition Night wouldn’t have happened either.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1CP1751wJA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vvQJn7fe7c

The Brewers didn’t become a contender until 1978, when they hired general manager Harry Dalton, who acquired actual players (Cecil Cooper, Sal Bando, Larry Hisle, Ben Oglivie and Mike Caldwell all arrived via trade or free-agent signing, followed later by Rollie Fingers, Ted Simmons, Pete Vuckovich and Don Sutton) and hired manager George Bamberger. The Brewers have always been a small-market franchise, but they weren’t any good at finding talent anyway for most of their first decade of existence. The Brewers were horrible at marketing during the entire time the Seligs owned the franchise. If they didn’t have good seasons on the field, they didn’t draw well.

One wonders whether Milwaukee would have baseball today were it not for the Pilots. It is inconceivable today that any major league would award an expansion franchise — or, for that matter, approve a sale — to an ownership group as grossly undercapitalized as the Pilots’ owners must have been to go into bankruptcy one year after getting the franchise. (The Pilots were one of four 1969 expansion teams, and one of two — Montreal is the other — not in their original home anymore.) Then again, as baseball team owner Charles O. Finley once said he’d “never seen so many damned idiots as the owners in sport.”