This WTMJ Opening Day feature is presented by Sentry Foods.
Opening Day is a given in Milwaukee, the reward we enjoy after enduring what is usually another brutal Wisconsin winter. There was a time when we weren't invited to Major League Baseball's annual party, a four-year-stretch when we were on the outside looking in.
812 miles separate Milwaukee and Atlanta, Ga., but on April 12, 1966 the chasm could be measured in light years.
Atlanta packed a brand new stadium to see the freshly acquired Braves take on the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The name Pittsburgh was up in big letters on the Milwaukee County Stadium scoreboard that afternoon. Ushers, ticket takers and other staff were but a phone call away, the field prepped and ready for a game that wouldn't happen here.
After years of rumors and a lame-duck 1965 season in Milwaukee, the braves started '66 in Dixie.
What was Opening Day down south was simply Tuesday in Wisconsin. As 50,000 packed Atlanta's new park, County Stadium stood virtually empty, save a few ballpark staffers plus a lone woman named Florence Murray.
She was shown in the following day's Milwaukee Sentinel in page nine of the sports section, sitting in her usual seat, as she had for every opener dating back to the club's 1953 arrival.
The legal fight to get the Braves back dragged on that day. The park had to be prepped just in case a judge ruled that the Braves would have to return.
The verdict came in the next day: The court saying the Braves and the National League violated state anti-trust laws in letting the team leave, ordering the NL to either give Milwaukee an expansion club in '67 or return the Braves on May 18th.
Neither happened.
The State Supreme Court ended all hope of a Nilwaukee return three months later. Braves owner Bill Bartholomay tried justifying the move to the local jilted fans.
“It’s an impossible thing to explain to that type of fan. The only unfortunate thing is that there are not enough of them. We did everything we can to renew even part of the interest that existed in the 50’s. Support was, at beast, very limited,” he said at the time.
As Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews and other familiar faces dug in down south, Milwaukee County Stadium stayed dark, save the three Packers regular season games played there in 1966 plus an exhibition tilt that summer.
Our town's life on the outside looking in at MLB was officially on. But not for long.
Milwaukee-area car dealer Bud Selig formed a group working to bring Milwaukee an expansion team.
To show the city's baseball appetite was intact, he got the Chicago White Sox to do an exhibition game here against the Twins. On July 24th, 1967 more than 51,000 fans showed up in a park that held just under 44,000, some of the extras standing on the roped-off warning track.
Selig got the Sox to do nine more games here, real ones that counted in the standings, tilts that averaged just under 30,000 per game, more than three times what the Sox drew in Chicago.
Baseball's overlords weren't impressed: the expansion clubs that spring went to Montreal, San Diego, Kansas City and Seattle.
Chicago called Milwaukee home for 11 more games in '69, contests that still drew on average three times what the Sox were getting at Comiskey Park on the Windy City’s south side.
Selig pushed Chicago owner Arthur Allen to sell and had a hand-shake deal to do so, but baseball again intervened. MLB wanted an American League presence in the Windy City, and Allen sold instead to his brother who didn't want to leave.
Selig and Milwaukee were still without a team as a new decade loomed.
As it turned out, the cure for Milwaukee's baseball jones and the answer to Selig's quest rested not in Chicago, but instead out west.
Selig bought the Seattle Pilots out of bankruptcy court, the team floundering after a single American League season.
Baseball was back in Milwaukee for the spring of 1970.
And has stayed ever since.