While thinking about the Braves colorful history while in Milwaukee last week, I came upon this neat article about the old Boston Braves..

Enjoy!

Fifty years ago this fall, a Boston team beat the Yankees in the World Series. Fifty-five years ago, a Boston team signed the greatest home-run hitter who ever lived. Fifty-seven years ago, a Boston team became one of the first in the major leagues to integrate and its first African-American player went on to win the Rookie of the Year award. That team, obviously, was not the Red Sox. That team was the Boston Braves.That is, they used to be the Boston Braves, though by the time they achieved these milestones they had moved to Milwaukee lured by a new stadium and a baseball-hungry fan base after several seasons of paltry attendance in Boston and then later Atlanta, which they currently call home.In 1953, after 76 seasons of baseball in the Hub, Bostons other baseball team Bostons first baseball team packed its bags and balls and planted home plate in the Midwest. It was front-page news: a baseball team hadnt relocated in more than 50 years. This was, of course, four years before two New York teams the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants infamously left Gotham for, respectively, Los Angeles and San Francisco. But while the Dodgers remain part of Brooklyns founding myth, a mourned fragment of the citys identity even today, the Braves have all but disappeared from Bostons cultural memory. This despite the dogged efforts of a few hundred fans, some of whom still insist that the wrong team left town in 1953.The Braves known first, in 1876, as the Red Stockings or Red Caps, then variously as the Beaneaters, the Doves, the Rustlers, and the Bees werent always a competitive squad. (Hell, even with future Hall of Famers George Sisler and Rogers Hornsby on their roster in 1928, they finished in second-to-last place with 103 losses, 44 and a half games out of first.)But though their players often struggled on the field, the Braves franchise itself laid the groundwork for much of what we take for granted in baseball today: Sunday and night games, television and radio coverage, fan-appreciation days, even new uniform styles. They opened what was at one time the largest stadium in the majors. They were progressive on racial issues when the Red Sox were anything but. And they created the Jimmy Fund, which benefits Boston children with cancer.The Braves were always trying harder, says Sports Museum of New England curator Richard Johnson. They introduced satin uniforms because they looked better on TV. They lowered the field by two and a half feet, so the sightlines would be better. They introduced different items on the menu, like fried clams. The kind of stuff the Red Sox are doing now.Nowadays, Fenway is perpetually sold out, and it costs $315 for a family of four to watch a game. Back then, the Braves were quintessential working-class heroes: the players were underpaid underdogs; the stands were often all but empty; and kids were admitted for free. Those kids are now old men, but many of them still follow their team religiously even as it plays in Atlanta (the Atlanta Braves come to Fenway on May 18). And they remember a time when Boston was a two-team town.Cult of personalityThe old Braves Field, built in 1915, was bulldozed long ago, but its right-field pavilion still stands, incorporated into the structure of BUs Nickerson Field. Outside it stands a plaque, which proclaims that the fans of New England will never forget the exploits of their Braves and the fond memories associated with Braves Field.Would that it were so. Several years ago, Johnson, whos written books about both Boston baseball teams, remembers getting a call from a local sports-media figure who shall remain nameless: Gee, could you tell me, when did the Braves become the Red Sox? Johnson was dumbfounded. It took me 10 minutes to explain that there were two teams.The story of the Boston Braves begins in 1870, five years after the Civil War. The Cincinnati Red Stockings of the National Association of Base Ball Players, whod become the first completely professional team the previous year, voted to disband. So the Stockings Harry Wright, an English former cricketer (who more or less invented the job of team manager), his younger brother George (who more or less invented the position of shortstop), and a few other players decided drawn by the Hubs renown as a baseball hotbed to move to Boston.When the National Association dissolved in 1876, the team became a charter member of the new National League. Tracing its origins back to that first season in 1871 right up to the present-day in Atlanta makes it the oldest continuously playing team in American professional sports.The teams early, flashy players Grasshopper Jim Whitney, Charles Kid Nichols helped loosen up stiff Brahmin culture. Their parks the harborside Congress Street Grounds; the South End Grounds, with its turrets and spires were unlike anything seen in baseball, which to that point had not contributed mightily to the fields of architecture or public design. And the team was good, winning eight pennants over its first 23 seasons.Back in their heyday before World War I, Braves fans including JFKs grandfather John Honey Fitz Fitzgerald would convene at Nuf Ced McGreeveys Third Base Saloon in the South End. That was to baseball what CBGBs was to punk rock, says Johnson. A gathering place where the baseball tribes would hang out: players, spectators, press, politicians. The city of Boston was the epicenter of baseball. Not just Major League baseball, but baseball culture in this country. And the Braves franchise was at the heart of it. Everything we enjoy now about the game, the DNA is the Braves DNA.070511_braves_main2DREAM FIELDS: The fanciful South End Grounds (top) were replaced in 1915 by Braves Field in Allston, then the largest ballpark in America.That includes a fascination with players personalities and antics, and the Braves had some corkers over their first several decades. One of the first and best was King Kelly, who came to the team in 1887 for what was then an astronomical bounty of $10,000. He was a prodigious run producer and a prodigious drinker. Purportedly, one game was delayed because he was tippling with some rich swells in the box seats.He was a wild man! says Johnson. He wasnt just back-page news, he was front-page news. If ever there was a perfect superstar for the city of Boston, it was King Kelly. (The fact that he was Irish sure didnt hurt.) According to Kellys Wikipedia entry, he was often accompanied by a black monkey and a Japanese valet.Kelly was the subject of a pop song (Slide, Kelly, Slide!) and, in 1927, inspired a movie of the same name. He also wrote baseballs first autobiography. He was truly larger than life even the rules of the game bent to his will. Sometimes hed cut from first base across the infield to third, says Johnson. And with the crowd egging him on. And sometimes hed get away with it! It was wild stuff.In the teens, then again in the 30s, the Braves were home to another eccentric and talented Hall of Famer. Springfields own Rabbit Maranville just 55 and 155 pounds was one of the games most beloved clowns. He was the Ozzie Smith of his day, says Johnson. He would sit on the second base bag, take a relay toss, and fire strikes to home plate from a sitting position. People went crazy! They loved it. He was a showman. (After a few drinks, reads one bio, he became the hotel-ledge walker, the goldfish swallower, the practical joker.)The teams players werent the only characters. George Stallings, who managed the Braves for eight years including the season of their highly improbable World Series victory in 1914 was the son of a Confederate war hero. He dropped out of Johns Hopkins medical school to pursue a professional career as a catcher, playing exactly four games at that position, (for the 1890 Brooklyn Bridegrooms). Stallings became a manager fairly young, and could be seen on the bench in a natty suit instead of a uniform one he would not change for as long as the team was on a winning streak. And while skippering the New York Highlanders later to be renamed the Yankees he employed some rather innovative techniques. He had a guy stealing signs with a telescope from an apartment window, says Johnson, telegraphing him the information.There were other Hall of Famers. Cranston, Rhode Islands greatest center fielder, Hugh Duffy (18921900). The lefty workhorse Warren Spahn (19421964). The slugger Eddie Matthews, who was in the Hub for just his rookie season in 1952 but is the only man to have played for the team in all three of its home cities.There were famous-by-proxy players, such as strikeout-prone Vince DiMaggio. Vince played his first two seasons here (1937 and 1938) while his brother Joe was becoming a superstar in pinstripes, and two years before his other brother Dominic patrolled center field for the Red Sox.Then there was a slugger named George Herman Ruth, who was enticed in 1935 to return to Boston in the gloaming of his career with a promise from the teams owner, Judge Emil Fuchs, that he could manage the team upon his retirement. The 40-year-old Sultan of Swat ended up playing just 28 games, many marked by sloppy fielding, but did clout six home runs, including one in his first at-bat of the season, off the great Carl Hubbell.Nonetheless, it was a star-crossed pairing. By that point, Johnson says, the Bambino was aging in dog years. He did have one last heroic performance a 4-4, six-RBI, three-homer game in Pittsburgh that May but by June, he had retired. The pledge to make him a manager was never kept. And, in a sad irony, Ruths short stay with the team coincided with the Braves worst season ever: a pitiful 38-115 campaign. It was a bittersweet return, says Johnson.But the Braves did have some great successes. The greatest, of course, was the Miracle Braves World Series win in 1914.That season started in dismal fashion, with the team dropping 18 of their first 22 games. By the Fourth of July, the Braves were in last place, 15 games behind the New York Giants. Starting the next day, however, the team went on an astonishing 41-12 run, capping it by taking two games from the Giants, to slide into first. The rest of the season was a virtual cakewalk, and they won the National League pennant handily.Nonetheless, the Braves played the World Series as underdogs to Connie Macks Philadelphia Athletics. In the end, the Braves shocked the nation, beating the As in four games, the first World Series sweep. Second baseman Johnny Evers of Tinker to Evers to Chance fame won the Chalmers Award (precursor to the MVP), with Maranville and pitcher Bill James also turning in strong performances. The series was played at Fenway Park then just two years old because the South End Grounds were too small.Partway through the 1915 season, the Braves started playing at the new, enormous Braves Field, not far from Comm Ave. (It was called the Bee Hive during the period from 1936 to 1941, after the team had been renamed the Bees as the result of a fan poll.) At that point, with a capacity of 43,000, it was the largest in the country.(In his indispensable Historical Baseball Abstract, writer and statistician Bill James no relation to the pitcher unearths a secret: Legend has it that a dozen horses and mules were buried alive in a cave-in during construction, and lay beneath the third-base line as long as ball was played there.)Dodging historyWith such a colorful and influential history, why are the Boston Braves all but forgotten? Compare their place in the popular imagination with a team like the Brooklyn Dodgers, who are still mourned nearly a half century after they moved to Los Angeles. What accounts for the difference? Roger Kahn, who memorialized the Dodgers in his classic memoir The Boys of Summer, says there were many factors. For one thing, the Dodgers left town at the top of their game, having won a pennant and a World Series the previous two seasons. For another, they had Jackie Robinson. But there were also intrinsic differences between two places like Brooklyn and Boston.Bostons a city. It has the Athenaeum, it has Harvard, it has Faneuil Hall, Kahn tells the Phoenix from his home in New York State. Brooklyn was a borough. There was always kind of a complex that it was not really a city, it was a dormitory or Manhattans bedroom, as the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica described it and a lot of Brooklyn pride focused on the baseball team. The Dodgers were something of a joke in the 20s and 30s. But they got really good, really quick. After the war, here comes Jackie Robinson, and here comes the team I call the Boys of Summer. Six pennants in 10 years. There was great pride in that.The Braves, despite their pockets of success over the years, left town with a whimper. What I remember most vividly is that there werent many people in the ballpark, says Kahn, who covered the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune in 1952, the Braves last season in Braves Field. When Brooklyn [visited the Braves], it was unusual. Jackie Robinson was still a big drawing card, and around the National League the Dodgers played in front of big crowds. Not in Boston. We used to joke that Braves Field was a good place to read a book because it was so quiet.070511_hank_main2HANK AARON: might have changed Bostons racial reputation.Brave old worldGeorge Altison, 77, grew up in Allston, just a couple blocks from Braves Field. Hes now the business manager of the Boston Braves Historical Association (BBHA, boston-braves.com), a 14-year-old group, 500 or so members strong, which webmaster Byron Magrane, 32, describes, aptly, as basically a bunch of guys who get together every year and reminisce about the Braves.In the early 40s, when Altison was 11, he became a member of the Knot Hole Gang, a group of diehard youngsters who availed themselves of owner Lou Perinis idea to swell Braves Fields meager attendance: free admission for kids to the parks left-field pavilion.Then, when I was 14, I started working there as a concessionaire for Harry M. Stevens, Inc. [the USAs first sports food service], says Altison. He worked in Fenway, too, but the Braves were his team. He lived down the block. He was a fan, as was his father before him. They called us the blue-collar fans compared to the Red Sox fans.While Ted Williams and Jimmie Foxx were tearing it up down the street in Kenmore Square, Altison was in Allston, rooting for players with exquisitely evocative names like Whitey Wietelmann, Sibby Sisti, and Buddy Gremp. To my eyes, he says, the Boston Braves were the number-one team, win or lose.Art Lefty Johnson, 88, was teammates with Wietelmann, Sisti, and Gremp. (And, for that matter, with Sig Chops Broskie and Skippy Roberge.) The southpaw pitched for the Braves between 1940 and 1942, finishing his career with a 7-16 record and a 3.68 ERA. He pitched only 195-plus innings all told, 183 of them in 41. But his short time with the Braves is a very fond memory.Johnson turned pro right out of high school, in Winchester. As a matter of fact, my father signed a contract when I was still a junior in high school to be effective the day I graduated. After a few steps up the minor-league ladder, he was called up.The Braves were exactly where he wanted to be. Oh, I was always a Braves fan. I liked the National League because of the brand of ball that they played: the bunt, the hit-and-run, the steal. The Red Sox, they always played for the home run and the big scores. I liked the fundamentals. In my opinion, thats what the game was all about.Alas, the Braves proficiency with fundamentals came perhaps at the expense of their popularity. The Red Sox were always more popular in Boston, yes, recalls Johnson. The average fan likes to see the home run, the hits off the Monster wall. Not the 1-0 games that are over in an hour and 31 minutes.Lefty Johnson loved playing in the majors. And he wasnt a bad pitcher. But he tore his rotator cuff just before he enlisted in the Navy. And medical science wasnt then what it is now. But yknow, thats life, he says. I watch every bunt and fly ball, and still dream of being there.New kids in townThe Red Sox (then the Boston Americans) had swooped into town with a vengeance in 1901. American League founder Ban Johnson knew that if he was going to make his league work, if he was gonna win, says Richard Johnson, Boston would be a beachhead in that war.The war was won, and the way it happened, he says, should be a business school case study. First, Ban Johnson secured a prime piece of real estate for his team, setting up shop at the Huntington Avenue Grounds directly across from the Beaneaters South End Grounds, separated by the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad tracks. It was like someone building a Dunkins across from a Honeydew, says Richard Johnson, except in a much bigger way.The next step? Poach the Beaneaters best and most beloved player, the great third baseman Jimmy Collins, inducing him to literally cross the tracks for a substantial pay increase.Finally, says Johnson, They charged half as much for a ticket! So, who are you gonna root for if youre a fan? Fifty cents or a quarter? And are you gonna rip your Jimmy Collins picture down from the wall? It was basically, In your face! We didnt just throw down the gauntlet, we came in and burned your house down while you were asleep! Nonetheless, while the Red Sox had a major edge in fan loyalty, there was little animosity between the two teams over the 52 years they shared this city. They played a three-game preseason series every year. The players got along and respected each other. And the fans even while they had their loyalties werent exactly divided into warring tribes. By the 40s, it was more sort of a class division, where the Red Sox were the team of the haves, and the Braves were the team of the immigrants and the have-nots. The Braves had the Knot Hole Gang, and the Red Sox didnt. At Fenway you had to pay full price. At Braves Field, you got in for a nickel.There never was the same animosity between fans of the two franchises that exists in, say, Chicago, where youre either a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan. Unless youre Hillary Clinton.But the vagaries of fate did allow the Red Sox to outshine their neighbors at inopportune times. Even when the Braves have their greatest year in 1914, notes Johnson, its smack in the middle of the Red Sox golden era with the Sox winning World Series in 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918. Ironically, as the Braves played the 14 series in Fenway, the Sox played the 15 and 16 series at newer Braves Field to fit larger crowds. It didnt work for the Braves, but it worked for them, says Johnson. The Braves never won a World Series at Braves FielBut they did win the pennant there in 1948. And what might have taken place at Braves Field and at Fenway Park that fall is one of the great disappointments of Boston sports history. The Red Sox were terrific that season but not quite good enough. They just missed the post-season, losing a one-game playoff to the Cleveland Indians, thus depriving the Hub of its last chance for a Boston/Boston subway series.Even the Braves last pennant in this city, however, was arguably obscured in the hubbub surrounding the Sox heartbreaking World Series loss in 1946, Ted Williamss second Triple Crown in 1947, and the epic pennant race with the Yankees chronicled by the late David Halberstam in The Summer of 49. Even when they were playing well, the Braves couldnt seem to catch a break.Race to the topIf both Boston teams were talented in the 40s, one area where they diverged drastically was in the area of race. In fact, by the mid-50s, the Braves had one of the most integrated teams in the majors, with center fielder Billy Bruton, first baseman George Crowe, and a power-hitting right fielder named Henry Aaron, whose contract had been purchased by the team for $10,000 in 1952.In 1945, Fenway Park played host to the now-infamous tryout of three Negro League players: outfielder Sam Jethroe of the Cleveland Buckeyes, second baseman Marvin Williams of the Philadelphia Stars, and a fleet shortstop from the Kansas City Monarchs named Jackie Robinson. The Red Sox could have signed any one of them. Could have been the first team to break the color line. Instead, after 90 minutes of hitting and fielding drills, the players heard a chilling voice boom from the shadows of the grandstand from an unknown member of the Sox brass: Get those niggers off the field!Robinson, of course, made history with the Brooklyn Dodgers two years later. Less well known is that Jethroe signed with the Boston Braves in 1950. He won the National League Rookie of the Year that season, and led the league in stolen bases in 50 and 51. The Red Sox? They wouldnt integrate for nearly another decade, until 1959 the last team in the majors to do so, when they signed infielder Pumpsie Green.Jackie Robinson had been retired for two and a half seasons before they signed Pumpsie Green, says Johnson incredulously. The Bruins were integrated before the Red Sox!The Braves were very progressive, he continues. But I dont think they were out to make a social statement. They were like the Celtics: trying to get the best players they could, and they werent letting the old conventions dictate anything.Imagine for a moment what having Hammerin Hank in Boston for 22 seasons might have meant. If hed hit those 755 home runs in the Hub, might it have done something to change the racial climate in this infamously segregated city?Hank Aaron would have been unbelievable, says Magrane. It probably wouldve taken some of the stigma out of race relations. Heres a Boston baseball team with a phenomenal black player. You wouldnt get some of the stigma that surrounded the Red Sox you always hear that they were racist.070511_braves_main5A DIGNIFIED CROWD: Honey Fitz (second from left) was a regular at the teams watering hole.A change will do you goodThe Braves fortunes took a turn after moving to Milwaukee: they played before a record 1.8 million ecstatic fans their first season in a brand new stadium; Eddie Mathews won the home-run title; and Spahn led the league with 23 wins. They won the World Series in 57 and added another pennant in 58.In 1966, taking advantage of the burgeoning Southern market, the team headed to Atlanta, where their success was even greater: pennants in 91, 92, 96, and 99, a World Series in 95, and 11 straight division titles. Broadcast nationwide on owner Ted Turners WTBS, they were marketed as Americas Team.All that glory contrasts sharply with the teams final years in Boston. The handwriting was on the wall when only 200-something thousand came in 1952, says Johnson. Only two games topped 10,000, which was hard to believe. The Braves were at the cutting edge, but they were the second team in a town that, at times, didnt even support the Red Sox that well.So many what-ifs. What if there had been a Red Sox-Braves World Series in 1948? And what if the Braves had won? Might we be rooting for John Smoltz instead of Curt Schilling?I still get a lot of calls and a lot of letters, says Altison, stating that the wrong team left Boston.Luckily, before leaving for Milwaukee, the Braves handed the reins of one of their signature achievements off to the Red Sox: the Jimmy Fund. Although its impossible to diminish the great work the Red Sox have done with the Jimmy Fund over the last five decades, its hardly ever remembered that it was the Braves who were the favorite team of the original Jimmy, the late Einar Gustafson. It was Braves players who crowded into his hospital room when he appeared on Truth or Consequences. It was Ashland-born owner Lou Perini who founded the charity with Braves PR man Billy Sullivan.The Jimmy Fund was a stroke of genius, says Johnson. Taking a medical institution, pairing it with a team, and using it for philanthropic ends. Completely cutting edge. The Jimmy Fund is the lasting tribute to that franchise.And so are the Boston fans ever fewer of them who still root for their team, even as the Braves play in front of 50,000 tomahawk-choppin fans at Atlantas Turner Field. BBHAs Byron Magrane remembers talking to one old timer in his local corner store in Revere who was wearing a cap with an A on it.I said, Why arent you a Red Sox fan? He said, The Red Sox arent my team. The Braves are my team. Theyve always been my team, and theyre the team Im going to root for until the day I die. As the Red Sox flourish, the Braves legacy fades ever faster. Altison recites the names of former players whove passed away since the beginning of last year: Sibby Sisti. Johnny Sain. Lew Burdette. Buddy Kerr. Ray Berres, the oldest Brave, died in February at age 99.Slowly, living memory is disappearing. You put a lot of effort into rooting for these teams and then one day theyre gone, says Magrane. This team was around for years. It had generations of fans. And now no one seems to care about them. Kind of sad, in a way.