There's No Brewing In Baseball
How fears of commercialism gave us Busch Stadium – and then, shortly thereafter, Busch Beer
Special thanks to reader Peter, who sent me the basis for this story.
The St. Louis Cardinals have played in a ballpark called Busch Stadium since 1953. They’re currently on the third iteration, and the first wasn’t originally named Busch, instead opening in 1902 under the name Sportsman’s Park.
“Busch Stadium” also wasn’t the originally planned name change from the incredibly inspired Sportsman’s Park. It was a compromise amid a variety of objections that, at the time, stretched from the Commissioner of Major League Baseball to a Colorado Senator.
When Anheuser-Busch, Inc. purchased the Cardinals in February of 1953, they prevented the team from moving out of town and were praised as civic heroes by the governor of Missouri. Even Griesedieck Brothers Brewing (who currently bill themselves as “the oldest beer family in St. Louis” and had the number-one selling beer brand in the city at the time) sent a telegram of congratulations and wished them “every success in the operation of this great Cardinal baseball club,” though they also made a point of gently reminding new ownership that Griesedieck planned to continue as the TV and radio broadcast partner of the team.
And, to be clear, it was Anheuser-Busch, the company, that bought the Cardinals. Stockholders had to approve the deal, and a new subsidiary was created within Anheuser-Busch to run the baseball team. August “Gussie” A. Busch Jr., the president of the brewery, got most of the press and was named head of the team, but this was not a beer mogul spending his own money on a franchise.
I point that out because after the company bought the Cardinals, they bought Sportsman’s Park from the city’s other franchise, the St, Louis Browns, who would wind up decamping for Baltimore and changing their name to the Orioles. On the day the purchase was announced, Anheuser-Busch also declared that the stadium would be known as …Budweiser Park!
That name only stuck around for a single day.
Ford Frick, the Commissioner at the time, called Busch and told him baseball would not allow him to name the stadium after his most famous product. In an editorial, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said the move “would have made a sandwich board out of the ball park in behalf of a famous beer that needs no such publicity.” Others pointed out that naming the stadium Budweiser Park would put sponsors like Griesedieck in the odd position of talking about a competitor during the broadcast.
It’s not entirely clear to me if the commercialism or the promotion of alcohol was the issue, and it might have been a little of both. Gussie backpedaled, announcing the next day: “The ball park will be known as Busch Stadium in memory of the founder and past presidents of Anheuser-Busch, Inc. Realizing that Budweiser is a brand name of our product, we decided the name would not be appropriate.” It helped that history was on their side - the Cubs called Wrigley Field home, after all, and several other teams played in venues named after their owners (who often had businesses named after them as well).
Still, even the Busch Stadium change didn’t make everyone happy. Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin, president of the Chicago-based Women’s Christian Temperance Union, mocked the pivot.
“Busch is not much of an improvement [...] Call it Beer Park, Budweiser Park, or Busch Park and they all mean the same thing. No athletic park ought to be named for a brewer because everybody knows that beer and athletics don’t mix …”
Colvin passed away in 1955, so we’ll never know what she thought about Major League Baseball bringing back the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970 or whether she enjoyed Artie Lange's Beer League.
The thing is, Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin wasn’t wrong! Bitter Brew, William Knoedelseder’s 2014 book chronicling the history of Anheuser-Busch, details how Gussie Busch thought of the Cardinals purchase as a smart business transaction for the company. At the time, the Cardinals were both the southernmost and westernmost team in the majors, which meant they had a huge fan base. Keeping the Cardinals in St. Louis would both get Busch and his company praised by the locals and prevent Milwaukee, where the team had been rumored to move, from gaining a Major League Baseball team – and that would be bad for Milwaukee-based Pabst and Schlitz. It would cut off Griesedieck from a major advertising opportunity, as Anheueser-Busch ceased the broadcast deal their competitor had with the Cardinals, contributing to the Griesedieck brewery eventually closing in 1977. And Busch would be able to turn the stadium, whatever its name, into a Budweiser beer garden for long (and hot) stretches of the year.
But there was one more hurdle left for Gussie and the Cardinals. In February 1954, Colorado Senator Edwin Johnson introduced a bill that would make any professional baseball club owned by a beer or company subject to federal antitrust regulation, and he made it very clear that Busch was his target.
“Baseball to August A. Busch is a cold-blooded beer-peddling business and not the great American game which sportsmen revere,” Johnson said.
Again, not entirely wrong! Busch couldn’t admit that, however, and when he was called to a Senate committee hearing on the matter, he stuck to two talking points. First, he argued that Anheuser-Busch enjoyed plenty of success before buying the Cardinals, and they certainly didn’t need a baseball team to compete in the beer market. Second, he pointed out that Anheuser-Busch provided the only path to keep the Cardinals in St. Louis, which was his real objective.
He even went one step further, telling the Senator, “If anyone wants to buy the Cardinals, they’re open. All I ask is that they be kept in St. Louis.”
That got Johnson to fold, and Busch got right back to work Budweiser-ing his stadium. Before the 1954 season, the team added two features to the park: a neon version of the company’s eagle-in-a-capital-A logo that flapped its wings in celebration, and a 66-foot wide light-up Budweiser sign over the scoreboard, which was the only advertisement in the building.
And then, in 1955, the brewer introduced its first new product since Prohibition: Busch Bavarian. The stadium that had been forbidden from being named after a beer two years earlier just happened to share a name with a beer now.
The stadium that was briefly named Budweiser Park gave way to Busch Memorial Stadium in 1966, which was renamed to Busch Stadium in 1982. In 1996, Anheuser-Busch sold the team to new owners, who agreed to keep the name, and when the Cardinals opened their current park in April 2006, it was still named Busch Stadium thanks to a naming rights agreement between the club and Anheuser-Busch.
It’s a name that’s persisted longer than almost every other home of a major league team; only Fenway Park (1912), Wrigley Field (1916), Yankee Stadium (1923) are older. Other opportunities for Anheuser-Busch to extend their stadium branding popped up – in 1995, the company turned down the chance to rename San Francisco’s iconic Candlestick Park as, yup, you guessed it, Budweiser Park, and the beermaker nearly made a run at getting its name on the new stadium of the Milwaukee Brewers just to piss off Miller – but none of them came to fruition, leaving Busch Stadium to stand on its own.
And it wasn’t even the first choice when Gussie Busch and his beer company bought the team.