No right-thinking boy should be starting a full-fledged love affair when he’s just 13 but that’s exactly what I did 50 years ago, on April 7, 1970.
Sure, I already had crushes on Ginger and Mary Ann from “Gilligan’s Island” as well as Marcia on “The Brady Bunch” but could only be dealt with in 30 minute weekly dispatches on our grainy black-and-white TV, long distance affairs of the heart that could never be acted out upon.
No, the one that began that spring day involved baseball in general, the newly minted Milwaukee Brewers in particular. They played their first game ever that afternoon–or shall we say, the visiting California Angels actually performed while the Crew pretty much watched as the Halos prevailed 12-0. It’s the one game then-owner Alan “Bud” Selig admits he didn’t care about in terms of who won or lost, the fact being he was simply giddy over the fact that his five-year quest to bring MLB baseball back to Milwaukee had ended in success.
“Success” would be hard to find much of the rest of the season. “You wanted a team in the worst way,” a fan famously told Selig on his way out of County Stadium that afternoon, “and that’s what you’ve got!” That day’s whitewashing wasn’t an aberration. It would be standard operating procedure for much of the 1970 campaign.
“No, we were bad,” Selig admitted to me in an interview last week. “We were an expansion team, and in those days expansion was a painful process for everybody…was it a bad team? Yeah, it was a real bad team.”
And, for a franchise so young–just entering its second season of ball after spending year one as the Seattle Pilots–it sported an old roster. Pilot execs drafted veterans from other teams in hopes of fielding a squad that could immediately compete. The gambles on guys like Jim Bouton, Tommy Davis and Steve Barber didn’t pay off. Barber and Davis couldn’t shake off nagging injuries that prevented possible returns to their prime. Bouton–who’d been a starting stud with the ’64 Yankees before blowing out his arm–couldn’t consistently master his new adopted pitch of choice, the knuckleball, one he hoped would make him a closer. Bouton’s best work in Seattle happened not on the mound but in the book store where his 1969 Pilots diary “Ball Four” became a bestseller, a tell-all that lifted the lid on how ballplayers REALLY are. Or at least, were.
No one who took the field that afternoon against the Angels has a bust in Cooperstown: it was a starting nine of journeymen, including Max Alvis at third, Ted Kubiak at short, Jerry McNertney behind the dish and an outfield that included a past-prime Russ Snyder. On the bump was former Oakland Athletic Lew Krause who’s posted one winning season in seven seasons prior to his Milwaukee arrival. He’d give up four runs (all earned) in just three innings that afternoon before relievers John Gelnar, George Lauzerique, Bob Meyer and John Morris would get roughed up for eight more (six earned).
They weren’t all bad, though: that day’s starting second baseman,Tommy Harper, would go on to hit .296 wtih 31 homers and 38 stolen bases, good enough to make him the Brewers’ lone representative on that year’s American League All Star team. Starter Marty Pattin went 14-12 with a 3.38 ERA, the only Milwaukee starter to post a winning record. Reliever Kenny Sanders joined the team a few weeks into the season and managed to grind out 13 saves, becoming the Crew’s fist bona-fide closer. Gene Brabender–a native of Black Earth, Wisconsin–struggled to a 6-15 mark with a 6.02 ERA, but he had a last name that made me and every other 13 year old fan giggle.
Tee hee. Brabender. Not that you’d dare do that in person since he stood 6-5 and clocked in well over 200 pounds, while sporting a home-made blow gun he’d use to scare the stuff out of his teammates in the clubhouse.
The Brewers lost game two to California and the first of a four game set with the Sox in Chicago before cracking off three straight over the Pale Hose. They were 3-3 as they headed west to take on the A’s.
They’d never see .500 again.
The Brewers lost 2 of 19 after that and another eight of nine heading into the 4th of July when they were 26-53, sitting 24 and a half games back in dead last in the American League West. By that point only four of the eight men who were in the Opening Day lineup were still starting. They didn’t get much better the rest of the way, finishing 65-97. The only saving grace? They’d battled their way out of the division cellar. Well, not so much “battled.” It was more as though the Chicago White Sox seemed to want the basement even more, coming in at 56-106, some 42 games out. The Crew would be tied for fourth–FOURTH!–with 1969’s other expansion club, Kansas City. While the Pilots/Brewers front office drafted old, the Royals went with youth, their 1970 roster flecked with future talent in the persons of Amos Otis, speedster Pat Kelly and Lou Piniella who the Pilot brass traded away, disliking his quick fuse more than they cared for his big bat.
What did Selig learn by season’s end? What did he know in the fall of 1970 that he didn’t realize that spring?
“That we had a front office that needed a complete restructuring,” Selig admits, a bunch he inherited from Seattle. “I knew then, ” he adds, “that if we were going to do the things that I wanted to do that we weren’t going to do it with this group.” The purge included GM Marvin Milkes who’d resign by year’s end, replaced by the legendary “Trader Frank” Lane. A roster purge would follow. By April of 1971 I could find just 18 players on the roster who’d finished with Milwaukee the season before. An amazing nine players would play their final big league game with the ’70 Brewers including Brabender. Two others (Greg Goosen and Rich Rollins) would start in Milwaukee but end up with other clubs where they’d call it a career that fall. Three more would retire in ’71. The “retooled” Brewers won only 69 games that following year, drawing just 732,000 fans which was 10th in the 12 team American League. They’d draw just 600,000 in ’73, dead last in the A-L. Desperate times called for desperate measures as Selig and his marketing team realized bad baseball wasn’t going to put butts in seats but Bernie and Bonnie Brewer might do the trick, along with cow milking contests, community nights and a guy named Uecker in the radio booth who made lousy games fun to listen to, along with sidekick Merle Harmon who constantly reminded fans that “all roads lead to County Stadium.”
Selig knew he had a problem dating back years. Fans were angry. They didn’t like how the Braves left Milwaukee in 1965. They were mad at baseball and chose to ignore the Brewers in droves, in some cases simply because the Crew was in the American League, cavorting against teams local Natonal League fans neither knew nor cared about. “And they were right to have anger,” Selig says. “I was hoping it would disappear and it did–around 1977 or ’78” when the roster was fleshing in with the likes of Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Ben Oglivie and Cecil Cooper (the only guy Selig himself engineered a trade for). They’d post their first winning season in ’79 and, well, you know the rest.
That is, if you’re of a certain age, when your first crush might’ve been Tina Louise, Dawn Wells or Maureen McCormick, about the same time you fell in love with guys named Hovley, Comer, Walton and Pena, not to mention a pitcher named Brabender.
Tee hee.
