This post could easily be called "The Intertwining of Three Mid-Market Baseball Teams' Histories", which is boring. As I was doing a little research about a piece about the Pacific Coast League and sports teams' names, every little tidbit added to this greater mosaic of history, which led to the breaking up of the original idea into at least three posts.
This particular post I feel could be expanded into a bigger thing. I just think the connections between the identities of the cities is ripe. This idea is bigger, anyway.
So I'll just shut up and get on with it.
There are some cities in America that get along with baseball. They enjoy it here and there, definitely when the team is doing well, but they never seem to get too bent out of shape about it. Dallas is like this. They like their Rangers, but it's almost secondary. Sometimes I get that feeling about Oakland as well. Maybe they just haven't had a lot to work with in a while--hell, they were home to the Oakland Oaks back in the day, so there was some reason Finley decided to move them there from KC.
The three cities I'm talking about in this post aren't those types of cities. These are the hard-core baseball cities. These have had historical teams ripped away only to replace them the next year (or a few years down the way), complete with the same name and team history. The teams acted as an extension of the city itself. They were institutions more than today's business venture identities.
These three cities are connected in a strange way that highlights what I spoke of in the "Introduction" piece.
The cities: Baltimore, Milwaukee, and St. Louis.
I put St. Louis last because they've had the most recent success; they just won the world series, won it in 2006, and lost it in 2004. That's three World Series appearances in ten years. That's more than the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rangers, the only other teams with multiple visits in that span (2002-2011).
Milwaukee I put second, since they're coming up, won their division, but just couldn't get all the way to the Fall Classic.
Baltimore has been in a prolonged funk since Jeffery Maier hauled in then rookie Derek Jeter's fly ball in the playoffs in 1996, causing an erroneous home run to be awarded to Jeter, spelling the eventual doom of the Orioles that year. The fans aren't really turning out. I've been reading about the beleaguered Baltimore baseball fan; they're screaming for new ownership to right the ship. They desperately want to return the franchise to it's rightful place of glory.
The Baltimore Oriole baseball team has a colorful history. They were fielding teams in Baltimore called the "Orioles" from before the Civil War. Over the course of a few decades they'd have success, major successes, and were invited to join the more major leagues many times. They refused as many times. The team would go through a rough patch, nearly go bankrupt, be sold and moved. This happened as well. Not every year was a championship year.
Soon after these moves, another organization would be built, and a new Oriole team would be established. Soon they'd be kicking butt, then they might falter. Before what we call the major leagues totally enslaved the minor league, there were two teams from minor leagues that repeatedly bested the teams from the lone major league (the National League) whenever they played: the Newark Bears and the Baltimore Orioles. Both were asked to join the NL, both refused. During a period of financial hardships, an Oriole owner accepted an invitation to join the upstart American League.
After just one year, he moved the team to New York, where it eventually became the Yankees. Baltimore would get another team through a move, another one of the charter members of the American league, but it would take a number of years, and other stops along the way.
Much has been made of the Dodgers and Giants leaving their boroughs in New York for California during the same winter, changing the baseball landscape and truly connecting a basically rural America through sport.
That, though, was not the first time a major league team headed west. The Philadelphia A's moved to Kansas City before the Dodgers and Giants, but before the A's the original abandoners of their East Coast origins were the Boston Braves.
The Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee. Just as the Dodgers displaced the LA Angels and Hollywood Stars, and the Giants displaced the SF Seals, the Braves displaced the favorite sons of Milwaukee baseball, their very own minor leaguers. Care to guess on their name? If you said the Brewers, you've been paying attention or are a good guesser. Say what you will for Milwaukee baseball nowadays, but for almost the entire first decade the Braves were in Milwaukee, they led the entire major leagues in attendance. They even won the only World Series in both Milwaukee and Hank Aaron's history. (Way to go Hammer! Still more than Barry!)
The Braves in Milwaukee adopted the color scheme of the Brewers, navy and red. Even until recently the Braves have had two-tone caps, red bills with navy crowns and a white A, reminiscent of the white M used for both the Brewers and Braves.
A few years after the Braves vacated Milwaukee for Atlanta, a used car salesman named Bud Selig, a fervent lover of Milwaukee baseball, organized the purchase of the the strapped Seattle Pilots expansion team, and after only a single year in Seattle, they were relocated to Milwaukee. Their name? Do I have to tell you?
The Brewers were supposed to reclaim the navy and red color scheme from the original Brewer team, only the sale happened so fast and a reliable apparel company couldn't be found, so they just tore the Pilots logos off and sewed on Brewer logos. They simply adopted the Pilots' colors of gold and blue as their own.
But, see, the story of Milwaukee baseball goes back almost as far as the Orioles. The Brewers were a successful baseball team in Milwaukee during the 1880s and 1890s, and were extended an invitation to the new American League in 1901.
Isn't that wild? Two of the original franchises in the American League are the Baltimore Orioles and the Milwaukee Brewers, neither of which is still named that or located there.
In any case, something spooked the owner of the Brewers, because before the beginning of the 1902 season, after just one year of play in Milwaukee, the team was moved to St. Louis. Before the 1902 season in Milwaukee, after the American League team left, they easily fielded another team, named it the Brewers, and joined a minor league, most likely the one that they'd left to join the AL a year earlier. From 1902 to 1952 that same Brewer team was Milwaukee's baseball team, right up until the Braves came to town.
The Brewer team that moved to St. Louis adopted the name Browns, and became a staple of St. Louis sports. For the first few decades the Browns were in St. Louis, the goal of the owner's group was to run the Cardinals out of town. For a while they seemed to be working. Not that the Browns were winning a whole lot, but they were doing better than the Cardinals, which was all that they wanted. Any takers of the name choice? The Browns was a shortening of the original name for what turned into the Cardinals, the Brown Stockings.
The bitterness was palpable. People were still so upset that the Browns had changed into the Cardinals that they got another team and called them the Browns. they actively tried to destroy their opposition's franchise. It worked for a hot minute, then, with players like Dizzy Dean and Stan Musial, the Cardinals went on to be one of baseball's model franchises, where it remains today, having won the second most World Series in baseball history.
The Browns had their colorful owner Bill Veeck, who angered the rest of the group of stodgy owners through his clowning up the league. A well known example of a Veeck stunt was when he put a midget, Eddie Gaedel, up to bat in a game.
Eventually the other owners forced him to sell. He'd wanted to move the team, and the other owners wanted him out of St. Louis as well, but they wanted him just out. They let him sell, and the Browns were finally out of St. Loo, and any guesses as to where they went?
They were moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles that we have today. With such a rich tradition and history stemming from a brief single season in Milwaukee and a half century in St. Louis, it's almost strange that the Orioles have basically wiped that history from their teams identity. The Washington Nationals might celebrate Rusty Staub, a player from the (more or less) glory years as an Expo in Montreal, but you don't get a whole lot of history from Wisconsin or Missouri at Camden Yards, the home of the Orioles.
That history is irrelevant to the identity of the of the Baltimore baseball fan. That's one of the criteria for being a baseball hotbed; baseball tunnel vision.
In Milwaukee, they field a team called the Brewers. When a major league team comes along, they embrace them, but after they spurn you, you do what you do, and field a team called the Brewers.
In St. Louis they field a team just to run another team out of town, going so far as to name it the original team's original name. That there's enough support for baseball is during those times is what a hotbed's all about.
In Baltimore they wash away the history that has nothing to do with the history of the Baltimore Orioles.
Singular focus.
There truly is plenty in a name. Plenty.
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