The American Association Milwaukee Brewers (Images of Baseball Series)
Rex
Hamann and Bob Koehler
Arcadia
Publishing, 2004
Reviewed
by Jim Melcher
My lifelong favorite baseball team
is not one of the big-market, high glamour franchises like the Boston
Red Sox
or New York Yankees, nor one fawned over by the literary establishment
like the
old Brooklyn Dodgers. Instead, they are a blue collar style team in a
blue
collar city about whom relatively few books are written: the Milwaukee
Brewers. The current, major league Brewers
returned to
prominence after a decade and a half of obscurity in 2007, riding the
hitting
of Prince Fielder and National League Rookie of the Year Ryan Braun.
As ignored as the current version of
the Brewers has often been, there is a longer-lived version that has
remained
even more obscure in the national mind: the old minor league Brewers
who played
for five decades in the American Association–a league that has itself
gone by
the wayside. Rex Hamann and Bob Koehler, two Milwaukee natives and Society for American
Baseball Research
(SABR) members, have helped those old
Brewers regain some of their old renown in The
American Association Milwaukee Brewers . This book is another in
Arcadia
Publishing’s “Images of Baseball” series, and it fits the Arcadia profile well: a small amount of
commentary and a
phenomenal number of excellent black and white photographs in a
relatively
small (128 pages) package. In an era before television was widespread,
high-level minor league teams like the old Brewers attracted a fiercely
devoted
following. My mother, who grew up in Milwaukee, can still rattle off the lineups of
the old
Brewers from the early 1940s and remembers them fondly.
The focus of the book is short
sketches of those old time players and managers, such as Joe “Unser
Choe”
Hauser, Bevo LeBourveau, Nick Cullop and Charlie Grimm.
One also gets a sense of what it was like to
watch a ballgame at the Brewers’ quirky Borchert Field, with its oddly
placed
dugouts and peculiar outfield dimensions. (Borchert Field was torn down
after
the construction of Milwaukee County Stadium; its site is now
underneath
Interstate 43 on the near north side of Milwaukee). Fans of old-time baseball, minor
league baseball
or Milwaukee baseball will find Hamann and Koehler’s
book a
real treat.
-Jim Melcher, December 2007