The Browns

A look back at the other team in St. Louis.

I am not ashamed to say I would buy merchandise for this team in a heartbeat.

I’ve seen several pro sports franchises relocate in my lifetime, though I’ve been lucky enough to avoid a direct hit so far. The NBA’s Kings moved out of Kansas City before I was old enough to get attached, though as a basketball fan, I’ve long lamented the fact that I don’t have a hometown pro team to root for. I keep clinging to the hope the NBA will come back someday, but until then I’m basically a free agent NBA fan.

A few months ago, a reader got upset with me because I wasn’t suitably angry at the A’s for leaving Kansas City, and that I even had the gall to adopt them as my second team when I was a kid, especially since they were actively competing against my favorite team in the AL West at the time. All I can say is that I was ten, and ten-year-olds typically don’t think about those kinds of things. Plus, the A’s left Kansas City twelve years before I was born. I never knew them as the K.C. A’s, and I never had to go through a time without pro baseball in Kansas City. The Royals have always been there in my lifetime, so it didn’t bother me.

But I think I can understand why the guy was so worked up. There’s a surprising amount of trauma when a franchise spurns an entire city. Obviously, it isn’t a life and death issue, but it still leaves a mark. Look no further than the soap opera that played out in Oakland for the last decade-plus.*

*Always gotta be something going on with the A’s, the nomads of MLB. But even accounting for their oft-traveled history, with all due respect to Philly, K.C., Sacramento, and Vegas, you’ll never convince me the A’s don’t rightfully belong in Oakland.

I’m not old enough to remember the Colts sneaking out of Baltimore in the dead of the night, but I certainly recall the drama when the Browns left Cleveland to take their spot twelve years later. The following year, the Houston Oilers, a franchise I loved, did the same thing, eventually forfeiting one of the coolest names and uniforms in the NFL to become the Tennessee Titans. In baseball, the Expos followed suit less than a year later, depriving us one of the coolest clubs and logos in MLB history to become the Washington Nationals, with their generic Walgreens’ hats.

Then there are the teams that ceased to be before you were ever on the scene, teams that exist in an almost mythical place beyond your own personal experiences. I suppose the Kansas City A’s fall into that category for me, but because they kept the same name and basic color scheme when they moved, they don’t seem quite so removed. The Boston and Milwaukee Braves occupy that same space, even though they were long before my time, because I can draw a direct line from them to the Atlanta Braves.

But when a team changes everything about itself when it moves, from its name right down to the color of its uniforms, the break is more distinct. Maybe not at first. I’m thinking of the aforementioned Browns/Ravens, Oilers/Titans, and the Seattle Supersonics/Oklahoma City Thunder. In the years immediately following their moves, the connection remained strong, despite the superficial changes. However, as the years have gone on, that link has definitely weakened, until it’s almost like it was never there at all.

This is especially true when you never knew the old version to begin with, and that’s why I want to talk about the other Browns, the ones who played baseball in St. Louis, before transforming into the Baltimore Orioles we know today.

The St. Louis Browns have always fascinated me, even though their history is rather lackluster, to say the least. As a Kansas City baseball fan who has spent the majority of his life in this area, I know there is a natural connection between Kansas City and St. Louis. I hesitate to call it a rivalry, at least on the baseball field, mostly because of how one-sided it has generally been. Cardinals fans tend to look in the direction of the Cubs when the r-word is brought up, and they’ve had intense, if more limited, runs against the Mets and Dodgers over the years, similar to the rivalry that existed between the Royals and Yankees in the late-‘70s and early-‘80s.

That said, whatever rivalry does exist between the Royals and Cardinals peaked during their 1985 World Series matchup. Just ask a Cardinals fan about that and it quickly becomes clear there’s more between the two teams than St. Louis fans like to admit. They’re not completely wrong though. Historically speaking, the Cardinals have eleven titles to the Royals’ two, and outside of the 1985 World Series, the teams never played a meaningful game against each other until the introduction of interleague play in 1997.

Since then, it’s been largely one-sided in St. Louis’ favor, but I wonder what could have been if the Browns stayed in town. They were an AL team, so the history of head-to-head play would have stretched back to the beginning of the Royals’ existence. Time is one of the key ingredients in cooking up a rivalry, and let’s be honest— the Orioles have had some great teams, but on the whole, they seem to operate closer to the Royals’ level than the Cardinals. Competitiveness is key too, and when you throw in the geography, that rivalry practically builds itself.

Alas, it wasn’t meant to be, which is too bad for the Royals, because for the bulk of their time in St. Louis, the Browns were not nearly as good as the Orioles have proven to be. Their story begins when they moved to St. Louis in 1902. In fact, they were originally the Milwaukee Brewers, just to add another layer to this whole relocation saga.*

*Bill Veeck, who later owned the Browns, actually got his start as an owner when he bought another Milwaukee Brewers franchise in 1940. These were still not the Brewers we know today, however. They were a minor league club. The modern-day Brewers were born after the Seattle Pilots played their first season as an expansion team in 1969. That one year was such a disaster and the ownership such a mess, the team was sold in the offseason to Bud Selig, who moved them to Milwaukee in 1970 and renamed them the Brewers.

Early in the history of this newsletter, I rated the Brewers’ powder blues the best in baseball history, and I said their ball-in-glove logo, which they recently brought back after an inexplicable hiatus, was the greatest logo ever.* The old Brewers didn’t have that classic look, so I doubt it hurt their fans to see them take on the uninspired nickname of the Browns.

*Highly debatable, of course, and on any given day, depending on how I’m feeling, I might even disagree with myself. But what’s not open for argument is that logo is definitively top tier in any sport.

If you’re wondering why any sports team would name themselves the Browns, you’re not alone. In this instance, we appear to have the Cardinals to blame, ironically. The Cardinals were originally called the St. Louis Brown Stockings before they decided to use a bare minimum of creativity and rebrand, and apparently the new club in town thought resurrecting the bland moniker would be a good way to connect with the city’s old-school baseball fans.

Their official logo was a knight in brown armor riding a horse, which should appeal to the medieval historian in me, but doesn’t. I much preferred their “Brownie the Elf” mascot, who came along in 1951 for the final three years of the franchise’s time in St. Louis. He’s very similar to the old Cleveland Browns logo, which they still sometimes paint on the fifty-yard-line, and I have to admit, I have a soft spot for brownie stories and Irish fairy tales in general. I’d love to see the Orioles break Brownie out on a hat as a nod to their history, but I’m not holding my breath.

Whether any of this appealed to St. Louis baseball fans or not, the Browns started out well enough. They were never a very successful team in the standings, but they shared historic Sportsman’s Park with the Cardinals for the first two decades of their existence, and they held their end of the ticket sales up relatively well, at least until the Cardinals struck out on their own and moved to the first Busch Stadium.

It would be easy to blame the split with the Cardinals for the Brown’s decline, but like I said, the Browns were popular enough on their own to begin with. The problem was they couldn’t maintain it because they simply weren’t very good. They only had four winning seasons in St. Louis, the peak of which came in 1944 when they matched up against the Cardinals in their historic all-St. Louis World Series.

1944 was the only season they outdrew the Cardinals after 1925, and it was their only World Series appearance. I recall my grandfather once mentioning what a big deal an all-St. Louis World Series was for the area, but he was a bit too preoccupied fighting WWII in Germany at the time to witness it in person, so he didn’t have any personal recollections to offer. After jumping out to a 2-1 series lead, the Browns lost in six games, and it was all downhill from there. In addition to losing teams, the Browns had few star players to bring in fans either.

George Sisler was easily the best player in Browns’ history, and he’s hardly a household name to anyone except the most hardcore seamheads. The 1922 AL MVP and two-time AL batting champ played the majority of his career in St. Louis, and he is best known for holding the single season hit record (257) from 1920 to 2004, when it was broken by Ichiro Suzuki. But by the early ‘50s, the Hall-of-Famer was a fading memory in St. Louis, as was the team’s brief brush with glory in 1944.

Bill Veeck is sometimes portrayed as the villain in the Browns’ story,* if there are any Browns fans still out there who care enough to be mad about the team’s departure. After becoming owner of the team, he went on record saying St. Louis could no longer support two teams, and he paved the way for the team to move to Baltimore after the 1953 season. For those searching for karmic justice, he was forced out during the relocation process, losing his stake in the Browns, though it was not the last MLB heard from Veeck.

*However you feel about Veeck’s approach to baseball ownership, and I generally admire him, the guy was a master at getting people through the turnstiles. He tried all his usual tricks in St. Louis, and if he believed it couldn’t work, it probably couldn’t work.

By then, the Cardinals had established themselves as baseball royalty, and the Browns were little more than an afterthought in their own city. The move to Baltimore allowed them to flourish, and it’s hard to argue it was a mistake.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what might have been if they’d stayed a few more years. The A’s moved to Kansas City in 1955. Would a Missouri rivalry have formed in the AL? Would either team have won enough to make anyone care? I think I know the answer to that, but it’s still fun to ponder the possibilities, unlikely as they might have been.

Can you imagine a hypothetical ALCS with Jim Palmer on the mound, with Brownie the Elf on his hat, staring down Kansas City A’s slugger Reggie Jackson in the box? Or fast forward a few years and picture Mark McGwire hitting bombs into the fountains of that world’s equivalent to Kauffman Stadium, or Browns shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. attempting to place the tag on Kansas City’s own Rickey Henderson. And the 2014 ALCS would certainly have looked very different.

I’m not saying I’d trade the reality for that fantasy. In fact, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t, but its intriguing all the same. Heck, maybe the winner could even play the Expos in the World Series.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Anyone out there have any firsthand memories of the St. Louis Browns? Or given them any thought at all? Share them in the comments, along with any takes you might have on other teams relocating.