George Webb opened his first
hamburger parlor in Milwaukee on the corner of Ogden and Van Buren in
1948. His model of a neighborhood diner proved popular,
and Webb and his successors gradually added locations across the city. The chain is past its prime but it’s still a Cream
City institution.
Webb was a devoted fan of the
hometown Brewers of the old American Association, and he began to issue
predictions on billboards and newspaper advertisements each spring that the
team would win 17 games in a row during the upcoming season. An
unspoken promise accompanied the prediction.
If the team won the 17 in a row, the restaurant would give away free
hamburgers. How many hamburgers wasn’t
clear.
17 sounds like a lot of wins but
the team had won 21 straight in 1926, so it wasn’t impossible.
The minor league Brewers never
reached those heights again and the team folded its tent when the Boston Braves
of the National League migrated to Milwaukee in 1953. Webb continued the annual predictions but
reduced the number of wins in the crystal ball to 12 in recognition of the stiffer
competition.
The number of hamburgers Webb
would ante up remained murky. Webb thought
10,000 was about right.
(The George Webb prediction of a 12
game winning streak for the Milwaukee Brewers was an annual event and widely
advertised in the city. A 1980 Brewers
pocket schedule distributed by the restaurant chain is one example.)
In April of 1956, the Braves won 11 in a row but that was as close as Aaron, Burdette, Mathews and Spahn would get before the team defected to Atlanta in 1966.
The newly minted Brewers of the
American League revived the classic pastime in Milwaukee a few years later, and
Webb’s 12-game winning streak prediction geared up again. Public opinion upped the bet on the number of
hamburgers at stake, from 10,000, to, well, one for everybody who came through
the doors. Everybody.
Three of those new Brewers teams
came close.
The 1973 club finished next to
last but strung together ten wins along the way.
Manager George Bamberger’s “Bambi’s
Bombers” homered their way to a ten-game winning streak in 1978.
The 1979 version also dropped out
at ten.
By 1986, the Bombers were history
and the team finished last in its division. The Brewers unexpectedly opened the
1987 season on the opposite heading, sweeping the Boston Red Sox in a three-game
series at home and then outlasting the Texas Rangers on the road in another
three-game sweep. A pair of wins over
the Baltimore Orioles ran the Brewer record to 8 wins without a loss when Juan
Nieves took the mound against the Birds in a wintry match at Memorial Stadium on
April 15.
Brewer rookie outfielder Jim
Paciorek took a hit away from Oriole first baseman Eddie Murray in the second
with a diving catch in left. Paul
Molitor speared two line drives down the third base line in the middle innings
and a double play by the rest of the infield in the seventh kept the Orioles
hitless until Murray came to bat again in the bottom of the ninth. With two outs, Murray laced a sinking liner to
the outfield that seemed destined to find the gap in right center. But Robin Yount snared the ball a few inches
off the turf with a diving lunge, and the 22-year old right-hander from Puerto
Rico completed the first and thus far only no-hitter thrown by a Brewers
pitcher.
Two days later,
the Rangers came to Milwaukee with just a single win on the season and trailing
a six-game losing streak in the dust.
Both teams continued in their separate directions when the Brewers took
the first two games in the series. The
11th win for the Brewers tied the American League record for most wins to start
a season. For the Rangers, it was a dismal eighth
straight loss.
On Easter
Sunday, the Rangers seemed on the verge of breaking the tandem strings. Jose Guzman corralled the Brewers through
most of the warm, spring afternoon, leaving the game in the sixth with a 4 to 1
lead, and Mitch Williams carried the margin into the bottom of the ninth.
(During the first 35 years that
Topps produced baseball sets, borders of the cards were almost always
white. A collector would need a single
hand to list the exceptions: the wood
grain of the 1962 set, a burlap pattern in 1968, the funeral gray of the jinxed
1970 set, black in 1971, and the pseudo-psychedelic hues of the 1975 cards. In 1987, Topps would look back 25 years and
return to some roots with another wood grain set.)
To thundering
cheers that could be heard for miles, Williams walked Glenn Braggs on five
pitches to open the frame and then gave up a seeing-eye single to Greg Brock
two pitches later. After Cecil Cooper
flew out to shallow left, Ranger manager Bobby Valentine yanked the fiery
left-hander, one game closer to earning his nickname Wild Thing. Valentine brought
in Greg Harris to face Rob Deer. Harris
hung a breaking ball on his second offering, and the free-swinging Brewer
deposited the mistake deep into the left field bleachers to tie the game at 4.
(If Topps looked to the past for
its card design, Fleer looked to the future.
The atmospheric blue borders predicted the more colorful designs in the
seasons to come. While the images
remained mostly standard portraits and stock poses, the Rob Deer card is a
remarkable and artful exception. The
photograph catches the slugger just past the point of muscular release. Deer’s shoulders torque one way, his hips
another. With the tension of the swing
still in full evidence, it’s a sculptural moment. A viewer is easily reminded of Myron’s Discus
Thrower. It’s a great card.)
(Myron, a fifth-century BCE genius
in casting bronze, is widely known for his Discobolus (“Discus Thrower”). None of his original sculptures survive. Roman copies preserve some of his work.)
Harris quickly
struck out B.J. Surhoff for the second out of the inning, and just as quickly
walked Jim Gantner. A different umpire
might have seen at least a couple of those pitches in the strike zone, and the
calls might have rattled Harris. He
threw three straight balls to Brewer shortstop Dale Sveum before finding his
footing and climbing his way back to a full count. But Sveum delivered the payoff to the right
field bleachers and the Brewers claimed their 12th straight win by a
final of 6 to 4. The 30,000 fans in
attendance dissolved in collective ecstasy, for the win and for the free
hamburgers.
With every
pitch during the inning, the crowd turned the decibel level in the stadium up another
notch. Gantner said that he remembered
the sound of the inning as much as anything.
“I’ve never heard such a continuous roar,” Ranger announcer Bob
Carpenter said after the game. One poet
of the game claimed to still hear echoes of the Sunday game in the concrete ramps
and steel beams of County Stadium until the club finally tore the old park
down.
The Brewers added one more win to
their streak on Monday, defeating the White Sox in Chicago 5 to 4. The victory tied the major league record for
wins out of the gate but the team ran out of gas on Tuesday. Brewer fans flocked to George Webb
restaurants on Wednesday as the chain redeemed its promise of free
hamburgers. By official count, the chain
gave away 168,194 burgers in eight hours.
Later in the year, Paul Molitor hit safely in 39 straight games.
It’s the seventh longest streak in major league history but the mark still falls almost three weeks short of Joe DiMaggio’s 56.
(In 1992, Score produced a lively set
of five insert cards centered on Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. About 35,000 of each card were produced. Number 4 is the title card of the set.)
Anybody banking on a prediction to come true for that record to fall is
going to wait a long time for lunch.
---Russell Streur
Thank you, Russell!
Thanks for Reading. Happy Collecting.
NEXT FRIDAY: I'm going to take a quick look at 2021 Heritage and discuss my revised collecting goals for 2021.
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