Given his place as one of the most significant figures in Major League Baseball of the past half-century, and as perhaps the central sporting figure in Milwaukee history, Bud Selig’s tenure as president and principal owner of the Milwaukee Brewers remains significantly under-examined. In his new book, Building the Brewers: Bud Selig and the Return of Major League Baseball to Milwaukee (McFarland), author Chris Zantow takes a fresh look at Selig’s efforts to fill the gap left by the departure of the Milwaukee Braves and details the often-shaky early years of the Brewers franchise.
The scope of Zantow’s story is impressive. He begins, quite literally, at the beginning—with the founding of Milwaukee in 1834. “Base ball” arrives a few decades later, first as a gentlemanly pastime, then as a professional sport. In just a few chapters, Zantow connects the earliest days of the game in the city to the tumult in the Major Leagues that brings the Braves west in 1953. This part of the story is a familiar one, but it leads into the book’s core topic, where much care and detail is taken to explain how a 30-something year old Selig ended up becoming his hometown’s baseball savior.
In the book’s final pages, Zantow quotes Selig’s induction speech at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum from 2017. “I devoted five long years in a relentless effort,” Selig said. “We would try, and we would fail. We would try, and we would fail. We would try, and we would fail.” It might seem like an odd bit of the speech to quote, but the strength of this book lies in detailing that failure and the ceaseless efforts of Selig and the group he headed. Zantow also offers a more complete picture of this drive than is given in most other histories of this period—including their efforts to bring pro soccer and basketball to the city.
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The book also does well to pay the proper respect to the short-lived Seattle Pilots, the franchise that Selig & Co. would purchase out of bankruptcy court just prior to the opening of the 1970 season. While so many other works on this topic pay weepy homage to the loss of Milwaukee’s Braves while treating Seattle’s Pilots like an abandoned living chair set out on the curb, Zantow spends considerable time on the short history of the Pilots and the efforts by Seattle’s baseball community to retain the team they had so long wanted.
With the franchise’s 50th anniversary now upon us, Building the Brewers is essential reading for any Brewers fan. While the upcoming year will certainly be filled with nostalgia-centric reminiscence on this era, Zantow provides a straightforward retelling of the often frustrating and decidedly unsentimental business of Major League Baseball in the late-1960s and early 1970s.
