February 20, 1953: Gussie Busch Buys the St. Louis Cardinals

Dorrel Norman Elvert Herzog and August Anheuser Busch Jr.

-- Whitey and Gussie -- celebrate a Pennant.

February 20, 1953: Gussie Busch, chairman of Anheuser-Busch Breweries, buys his hometown baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League. This changes the course of baseball history.

The man he bought the team from, Fred Saigh, was imprisoned for tax evasion, and, according to Major League Baseball's rules, this meant that he had to sell the team. He came very close to selling the Cards to a group that was going to move them to Milwaukee for 1953. And Bill Veeck, owner of the St. Louis Browns, of the American League, thought he would soon have St. Louis all to himself.

August Anheuser Busch Jr., grandson of Adolphus Busch and great-grandson of Eberhard Anheuser, founders of the St. Louis-based brewing company that bears their names, wasn't a baseball fan at first. But he liked being a bigshot, which sports team owners are. And he wanted to sell lots and lots of beer, under the brand he'd been selling it under, Budweiser, named for the Budweis region of Austria, from which his grandfather Adolphus had come.

Someone told him that the Cardinals were for sale, and that their radio network, which reached all over the Midwest and into the South, could be used to sell Budweiser. That was all Gussie needed to hear: He bought the Cardinals from Saigh, and then bought their ballpark, Sportsman's Park, from Veeck, ending the odd status of the legendary loser Browns (who had won only 1 Pennant, in 1944) being the landlords, and the far more successful Cardinals (who had won 13 Pennants and 5 World Series, including beating the Browns in '44), being the tenants.

From that day onward, the Browns were doomed, because Gussie was rich as hell, and, like Tom Yawkey of the Boston Red Sox, and later George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees and Earvin "Magic" Johnson of the Los Angeles Dodgers, he wasn't afraid to spend big if he thought it would get him big results.

He got them quickly. Not on the field. Not at the box office. In beer sales. In 1953, Budweiser was barely in the top 10 best-selling brands of beer in America. By the time the Cardinals won their next Pennant in 1964, Bud was Number 1, and several of those that had been in the top 10 had gone bust, or would in the coming years. Radio, TV and the Cardinals were what did it.

And, along the way, Gussie became a baseball fan. Eventually, on special occasions such as Opening Day or the postseason, he would ride around the field at Busch Memorial Stadium in the famous Clydesdale-driven beer wagon, waving his feathered Cardinal-red cowboy hat to the fans. He became that rare thing in sports: An owner who was beloved. (He had some nasty flaws, but most Cardinal fans didn't care.)

Veeck? He knew the game was up. He applied to the AL to move the Browns to Baltimore for 1954. But the other AL team owners hated his guts, and they voted to let the move happen, but only on the condition that Veeck sell the team to a Baltimore-based group. Ironically, it was a brewery that bought them: Gunther Brewing Company, led by Jerry Hoffberger. (In the 1950s, Baltimore was every bit a brewing town as St. Louis and Milwaukee.)

Gussie really, really wanted to sell more beer. He thought one way to do it was to rename the Cardinals' ballpark "Budweiser Stadium." The name "Sportsman's Park" had been used for St. Louis ballfields since 1866. But Commissioner Ford Frick vetoed the name change, arguing that it was only meant to promote the product. Imagine that happening today: A sports league's commissioner denying the selling of naming rights to a corporation.

Gussie hit the roof: He argued that the Chicago Cubs had been playing at Cubs Park, but that team owner William Wrigley, head of the chewing-gum company that still bears his name, had renamed it "Wrigley Field" in 1926. Frick reminded Gussie that Wrigley was the man's name: He hadn't renamed his ballpark "Doublemint Stadium" in an effort to increase sales of his most popular brand of gum.

Gussie took the hint -- but he took it in a direction that Frick did not anticipate: He renamed Sportsman's Park "Busch Stadium," and then created the Busch brand of beer. There was nothing Frick could do: Busch was the man's name. In 1966, what had been Sportsman's Park, on the north side of St. Louis, was replaced with a multipurpose stadium downtown, Busch Memorial Stadium. In 2006, a new stadium was built next-door, named simply Busch Stadium.

It took a few years, but the results worked out well for both cities. Between 1964 and 1987, the last time the Cards reached the postseason before Gussie died, a total of 24 seasons, St. Louis won 6 Pennants and 3 World Series, and Baltimore did the exact same. From the 1954 move of the Browns/Orioles, the Cardinals have made the postseason 23 times, the Orioles 13.

The 2006 edition of Busch Stadium.

This was never going to be the home of the St. Louis Browns.

Both the Cards in St. Louis, and the O's in Baltimore, have had their ups and downs since 1953. But the move worked out well for both teams. And while there is, to this day, nearly 70 years after the move, a St. Louis Browns Historical Society, it's hard to argue that the franchise, or the City of St. Louis, would have been better off if the Cards had moved instead, and the Browns had stayed -- or if Veeck had tried to make a go of it there anyway.

*

February 20, 1953 was a Friday. Baseball and football were out of season. And no games were scheduled for the NHL.

One game was played in the NBA: The Indianapolis Olympians beat the Baltimore Bullets, 59-58 at the Butler Fieldhouse (now named the Hinkle Fieldhouse) in Indianapolis. The Olympians folded at the end of the 1952-53 season; the Bullets, early in the 1954-55 season. A new Baltimore Bullets franchise played from 1963 to 1973, and is now known as the Washington Wizards.