Baseball
Originally known as Athletic Park, the park opened for baseball in 1888 During winter it was flooded and served as an ice hockey rink. The ballfield replaced the Wright Street Grounds. (Podoll, p. 46)
The ballpark operated as the home of the Milwaukee Creams of the Western League, later renamed the Brewers. The Creams/Brewers played there through the 1894 season.
The ballfield was also sublet to the Milwaukee Brewers club of the major league American Association for the last part of the 1891 season, replacing the disbanded Cincinnati Kelly's Killers. 1891 was the last year of the AA as a major. The AA merged into the National League for 1892, and the Milwaukee franchise was dropped.
The Western League version of the Brewers left Athletic Park and opened the Lloyd Street Grounds in 1895, continuing to play there until they became a major league club in 1901 as part of the American League, and then transferred to St. Louis Browns in 1902. (That team is currently the Baltimore Orioles.)
A new minor league version of the American Association formed in 1902, including a new Milwaukee Brewers club. Meanwhile, another new minor league club, the Creams, began play in a new version of the Western League. The Creams retained the lease on the Lloyd Street property, so the Brewers re-opened their 1887-1894 ballpark, initially calling it Brewer Field, although the name Athletic Park would endure until 1928.
Milwaukee was too small to support two ballclubs, and the Western League entry folded after 1903. The Western League and the AA formed a healthy rivalry, and would maintain business relations through the years, until the Western circuit folded after the 1937 season. The AA Brewers would play for 51 seasons before displaced by the Milwaukee Braves.
Athletic Park / Brewer Field was renamed Borchert Field at the start of the 1928 season in honor of previous owner Otto Borchert, who had died the previous year, on April 27, 1927, at a baseball dinner that was being broadcast live on the radio at the time (Podoll, p. 218). During the 1920s, the ballpark had been unofficially dubbed "Borchert's Orchard" by the media (Podoll, p. 189).
Borchert Field was also home to Milwaukee's short-lived entries in the Negro Leagues and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the Milwaukee Bears and Milwaukee Chicks. The Chicks won a pennant in their only year of operation.
Read more about this topic: Borchert Field
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)