![\"Browns](\"http:\/\/www.seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/brownsuniform.jpg\" "\\"brownsuniform\\"")
<\/a>Don’t ask me why. The star-crossed franchise hasn’t existed in its St. Louis form since 1953, when the club was sent packing to Baltimore to become birds. George Sisler may be the only Brown that your average baseball fan can name. And I’m from New England.\u00c2\u00a0 So why do I love reading anything I can get my eyes on about this largely forgotten team?<\/p>\nIs it the colors of those two handmade Cooperstown Ballcaps of mine, brown with orange trim and white with brown trim?\u00c2\u00a0 There’s just a warmth to them. Earthy, almost.\u00c2\u00a0 And the name<\/em> Browns, rhyming with frowns and clowns, a built-in sadness I can empathize with. It certainly isn’t because of their uniform logo, which at times was either the knight Saint Louis on a horse or some kind of diabolical pixie.\u00c2\u00a0 Nor their talent, because they never won a 20th century championship, and their sole pennant in 1944 largely happened because every other roster in the league was emptied by the War.<\/p>\n The Browns were very unlike the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, the Giants leaving New York, the A’s leaving Philadelphia, or the Senators leaving Washington.\u00c2\u00a0 Those teams moved but their names went with them, or in the Senators’ case, returned in expansion form.\u00c2\u00a0 The Browns’ sorry legacy is forever embedded in what for many decades was baseball\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153other\u00e2\u20ac\u009d two-team town, on the banks of the Mississippi.\u00c2\u00a0 All I know is that I’ve daydreamed about kicking back on a broiling 1930s afternoon at Sportsman’s Park with a lemonade, cigar, and 596 other fans, and that I’ve replayed three entire Strat-O-Matic seasons largely to see how Roy Cullenbine, Elam Vangilder and Baby Doll Jacobson would fare.<\/p>\n But the good news is: I’m not alone.<\/p>\n The St. Louis Browns Fan Club (or Historical Society, for long), has over three hundred members, 36 of them actual surviving Brownies. Club President Bill Rogers organizes yearly luncheons and dinners in St. Louis, complete with speakers and memorabilia exhibits, and is constantly looking to bring new and possibly younger members into the fold.\u00c2\u00a0 With Browns lore receding into the public mind a bit more each year, though, this is not an enviable task. Rogers is especially proud of his July banquet last year, when Bob Costas arrived unexpectedly to announce Tommy Lasorda as featured speaker in a last-minute coup.\u00c2\u00a0 (Lasorda is considered an “almost Brownie” merely for going to spring training in 1953 with the team.)<\/p>\n Rogers had the pleasure of attending nearly two dozen Browns games at Sportsman’s Park between 1948 and 1950.\u00c2\u00a0 In one, he even saw Joe DiMaggio launch three line drive homers off the giant scoreboard in left.\u00c2\u00a0 Although the Browns often got hammered by their better opponents, his memories\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand autographed scorecards\u00e2\u20ac\u201dare here to stay.<\/p>\n There was a time, though, far, far in the past, when the Browns were the ones doing the hammering. Between 1885 and 1888, the team won four straight American Association championships for their boisterous saloonkeeper owner, Chris von der Ahe. But it was a short-lived reign.\u00c2\u00a0 Ten years later, a devastating fire in the park’s grandstand injured spectators and forced von der Ahe to cover the many lawsuits by auctioning off the team.<\/p>\n When the American League began in 1901, the Milwaukee Brewers moved to town to become the new Browns, and the National League made it a party by bringing in another starving and wretched team called the Cleveland Spiders\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwho would be renamed the Cardinals.\u00c2\u00a0 The Browns let the Cardinals rent Sportsman’s Park from them, but neither team was anything to do cartwheels over.<\/p>\n After Branch Rickey became the Browns manager in 1913, though, the club began to improve.\u00c2\u00a0 The Cardinals nabbed Rickey away in ’17, when new Browns owner and ice business mogul Philip de Catesby Ball tried to sue him for breaking his contract, but Rickey’s influence on the club had already taken shape. In 1922 the Browns battled the Yankees for the pennant most of the season, and dropped two out of three tough games on the final weekend to lose out by one game. Still, they drew 713,000 for the season, a huge number for them.\u00c2\u00a0 Ball expanded the park’s seating, but his co-tenant Cardinals were the ones to benefit, winning pennants in 1926, 1928, 1930 and 1931 and becoming the city’s baseball darlings forevermore.<\/p>\n “Our fans didn’t boo us much,” said pitcher Ned Garver to Bill Rogers once, “because we often outnumbered them.”<\/p>\n Bill is already working on this year’s May luncheon, hoping to get Mike Veeck as a speaker.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s also been in prolonged “negotiating” discussions with club member Barry Blank, who has a wonderful personal collection of Browns memorabilia out in Arizona.\u00c2\u00a0 Barry already has uniforms, scorecards and hundreds of autographed balls, and is bidding with someone on Don Gutteridge’s 1944 World Series ring.\u00c2\u00a0 Bill has made Barry assorted offers to purchase some of these Browns heirlooms, but Barry says as long as he’s alive, he’d rather not sell.\u00c2\u00a0 “I just enjoy getting up every day and looking at them,”\u00c2\u00a0 he says.<\/p>\n It’s hard to argue with that.<\/p>\n Bill Rogers of the St. Louis Browns Historical Society\/Fan Club can be contacted at stlbrowns@swbell.net<\/em><\/p>\n And here’s his recommended brownucopia of Web sites:<\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/www.thestlbrowns.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/thestlbrowns.blogspot.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/stlbrownsmuseum.blogspot.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/brownsmerchandise.blogspot.com\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n http:\/\/stlbrowns.qbstores.com<\/a><\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n Jeff Polman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fictional replay blogs of the 1924 and 1977 seasons can be visited at http:\/\/1924andyouarethere.blogspot.com<\/a> and http:\/\/funkyball.wordpress.com<\/a>, respectively. He is also managing the 1931 Philadelphia A\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in the Seamheads\/Strat Anniversary League, and enjoying his investment in Al Simmons. <\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello. My name is Jeff and I’m a certified Brownsaholic. Don’t ask me why. The star-crossed franchise hasn’t existed in its St. Louis form since 1953, when the club was sent packing to Baltimore to become birds. George Sisler may be the only Brown that your average baseball fan can name. And I’m from New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":288,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[12777,12772,12768,273,12766,12771,4539,12774,12769,532,2518,12773,12770,558,970,1625,12776,12775,2463,12767],"class_list":["post-10705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-1930s","tag-baby-doll","tag-ballcaps","tag-baseball-fan","tag-bill-rogers","tag-browns-fan","tag-cigar","tag-clowns","tag-club-president","tag-dodgers","tag-george-sisler","tag-jacobson","tag-luncheons","tag-pennant","tag-president-bill","tag-s-park","tag-saint-louis","tag-sportsman","tag-st-louis-browns","tag-vangilder"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/288"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seamheads.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>During the Depression, the Browns quickly became the urchins.\u00c2\u00a0 In 1936 they drew a grand total of 80,992 for the entire SEASON, an average of a little over a thousand souls per game. Their ’44 pennant gave them a boost, but after losing in six to the cross-town Cards in the Series, they sank into wretchedness again, and even despite Bill Veeck buying the team and inserting a one-armed outfielder and midget into the lineup, the Cardinals were not to be knocked off their local perch, and a franchise move was inevitable.\u00c2\u00a0 The Browns finished .433 all-time while in St. Louis, worst in the league, with a losing record against every other team except ironically the 1902 Orioles, soon to become the Highlanders\/Yankees.<\/p>\n