Had it been you or one of your classmates listening to a hidden transistor radio, and had it been any other time, Old Sister Mary L. would have quickly and even gleefully beaten you (or them) to the point of delirium. But this time it was the old nun herself who kept pausing to check for updates on the radio hidden in her desk. The hometown Milwaukee Braves playing in the World Series in this October of 1957 is really a big deal, isn’t it? It’s as though the air itself were charged with electricity.

It might be hard for you to imagine right now, because to you Milwaukee has always been a very big and truly magical city. But the truth is, that to people living elsewhere in the country, your city had always been something of a joke: just a small, rusty immigrant town known mostly for making beer…until we got the Braves.

I know that you think the Braves have been in Milwaukee forever, but in fact they’d only recently moved here from Boston, because folks there were more interested in a team called the Red Sox. But Boston’s loss was Milwaukee’s gain, and the people here were crazy about the Braves. The team made the people of Milwaukee feel better about themselves. They were Big Leaguers, and that made Big Leaguers of us all.

Some other team could have come to Milwaukee, I suppose, but somehow the Braves always seemed perfect. They had the coolest uniforms, the best radio announcers, and at least for the moment the newest and most advanced ballpark in all of baseball: Milwaukee County Stadium. One of their biggest stars, pitcher Lew Burdette, lives just over on the next block. You play baseball with his kid, for heaven’s sake! You feel that the Braves and Milwaukee belong together. You feel that the Braves and YOU belong together.

Your first game at County Stadium, just this past summer, is another one of those memories you will bring with you into the distant future. You will never forget emerging from the ramp in the left field bleachers and seeing the cool and faultless green of the field contrasting crazily with the hot white of the Braves’ uniforms. You will remember the public address announcer, the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, and the smell of the hotdogs. You will remember Dad telling you about that small set of bleachers high on the hill behind the stadium where wounded American veterans are allowed to watch for free. And you will remember feeling proud that your team allows something like that to happen.

In the future, most baseball games and ALL World Series games will be played at night to accommodate television, which will be weird since baseball has always been a radio kind of game anyway. Teams will build, demolish and rebuild new stadiums, always making taxpayers pick up the tab, and always raising ticket prices until the cost of attending a game falls out of reach for many working class dads and their sons. Teams, sadly, will move from city to city with exasperating regularity, always looking for greener pastures and more money, and players in the future will all be millionaires. None of them will live in the kind of working class neighborhoods they live in now.  Finally—and this might be the worst news of all— baseball cards will no longer come with bubble gum.

I won’t tell you how this year’s series will end, because I don’t want to spoil it for you. But I will tell you that if the Braves actually beat the Yankees to become the World Champions of 1957, the Burdettes will most likely celebrate with neighbors and friends late into the night and if you’re good, maybe Mom and Dad will drive by and let you take it all in. In any case, someday you’ll want to give folks at least a sense of what baseball was like in 1957 and you’ll want to do a good job. So pay attention, and appreciate the magic of this very moment. Because baseball will never again be as wonderful as it is right now.

“County Stadium”    1996    John T. McCarthy, Jr.    8-color silkscreen

Note to those of us who reside in the future. Here’s a link to the radio broadcast of Game Seven – 1957 World Series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUE7_6imZ7A