Milwaukee's OTHER Baseball Team

Reading the buzz about the Brewers this past week and the comparisons to the 1982 Big Season got me thinking about Milwaukee’s OTHER big baseball season. It was1957, when Lew Burdette shut out the Yankees two times in four days to win the World Series. WIN the World Series! Why don’t the baseball writers and announcers make any to-do about that any more? It was a different baseball franchise, but it was a professional baseball team playing in Milwaukee. There must be more than one or two of us who still remember the Braves.

Pat and I were kids when the Braves came to Milwaukee to play in the brand new, publicly-owned Milwaukee County Stadium. Pat was my best friend. Baseball suddenly became Our Thing. We were just the right age for hero-worship. The boys our age were Such Babies, nowhere near as sophisticated as we girls.

It began that summer when we were 12. Whenever the Braves were in town, Pat and I would walk to the Village of Wauwatosa and take the streetcar to County Stadium to see Our Cool Guys. Our WAY COOL guys. You recall the names: Eddie Matthews. Johnny Logan. Bobby Thompson. Billy Bruton. Wes Covington. Henry Aaron. Del Crandel. Andy Pafko. And our personal favorite heart-throb: Taylor Phillips. Oh? You say you’ve never heard of him? Well, truth be known, no one has. He was not the star of the team, but he was Our Hero. HE actually talked to us. Really. He talked to young swooning girls. And sometimes he gave us stuff. It was tooo exciting.

In those days, the players parked in a reserved section of the Stadium parking lot, but anyone could go there and wait for them. Lots of kids followed the players to their cars, asking for autographs. Pat and I also discovered where, under the Stadium, the players would walk between the locker room and the dugout. It was a narrow path surrounded by nothing but a chainlink fence. We could almost touch them. We could talk to them. Oh, my. The thrill of it all.

On days when we had the 50 cents (or whatever it was) that it cost to sit in the bleachers in the 50's, we would buy tickets and actually watch the game. Pat and I always brought baseball mitts. If we got into the seated area early enough, Our Cool Guys would be warming up, throwing balls around, playing catch. Sometimes one of them would throw a ball to us that we could keep! Really! In one game I got one ball before the game and another one that was hit either foul or over the fence. I had several balls with signatures on them. I know I had Billy Bruton’s signature and maybe Andy Pafko’s. Maybe even Hank Aaron (back then he was called Henry.) Where are these collector’s items now, when they would be worth something? Probably my brothers traded them for bicycle pumps or auto parts.

Anyway, I think it’s high time that one of the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel reporters gave recognition to that other champion professional baseball team in Milwaukee, the one that actually won the World Series. So I’m going to include a few of my photos that were taken on my Brownie Box Camera in the parking lot of County Stadium in about 1954 or 55. I will try to figure out how to label them.

Okay: so I can't figure out how to label them. The top one is Billy Bruton, then Bobby Thomson, then Henry Aaron, then Taylor Phillips on the bottom. Aaron looks about as old as we were!

In case any Journal/Sentinel reporters are reading this, I have more pictures....
And to my brothers: You're supposed to be looking at the Cool Guys, not the Cool Cars.

Stirring the Pot