MADISON, Wis. (WMTV) – On this day, March 18, 1953, the Boston Braves baseball team announced their move to Milwaukee.

Lou Perini, the owner of the Braves, petitioned the National League to move his team to Milwaukee, and the move was unanimously approved on this day.

The Braves had been struggling to fill seats in Boston.

The Braves move was the first MLB franchise move in over 50 years.

Things moved pretty quickly for the Braves – just four weeks after their move, the team opened the 1953 season in Milwaukee in front of 34,000 fans at County Stadium.

Attendance that day represented over 12% of the total fans in attendance for the Braves the season before.

In 1966, the Braves moved again, relocating to Atlanta, where they remain today.

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Over the next decade, residents in all 19 Milwaukee County municipalities could see more left-turn lanes, curb bump-outs, raised crossings and other permanent transformations at the community’s most significant road hazards if city leaders follow recommendations outlined in new Municipal Safety Action Plans.

Each safety action plan was built through analyses of crash data, municipal expertise and public feedback, and provides recommendations for elected officials and staff on how to improve each area’s biggest safety risks, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley announced in a press conference March 17 in Wauwatosa. All plans can be viewed on the county website.

A $32 million federal grant secured by the Complete Communities Transportation Planning Project, which is led by the Milwaukee County Department of Transportation, helped fund the creation of the plans.

The publishing of the municipal safety action plans marks the end of that county’s three-phase planning project and could unlock more funding for recommendations in the plans, according to a news release shared following the press conference.

• The Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers 24-9 in a chaotic Cactus League game.
• Dodgers pitchers threw 250 pitches, nearly a record for a nine-inning game in the pitch-tracking era.
• The Brewers scored 10 runs in the fifth inning and another nine runs in the seventh inning.

GLENDALE, Ariz. – It was a full-fledged, unabashed cacophony of Cactus cuckooness. The kind of game where you just pray someone’s mom calls “Dinnertime!” and mercifully ends the whole thing. The kind of game that’s such a football score on the scoreboard that the manager started scheming up a run-pass option offense in the eighth inning.

The kind of game that perfectly sums up spring training in mid-March in the valley of the sun.

“Only in the Cactus League,” Pat Murphy said after the Milwaukee Brewers’ 24-9 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers on May 16 at Camelback Ranch-Glendale.

In all there would be 466 pitches thrown, 207 of them balls. Of those 466, 250 were from Dodgers hurlers; only once in the pitch tracking era since 2008 has a team thrown more pitches in a single nine-inning game than that. That game on July 16, 2021, saw the Washington Nationals chuck 258 mostly hapless-pellets toward the plate in, coincidentally, a 24-8 loss.

By the time the Dodgers were walking in a carousel of runs late, Murphy was talking off the ear of coaches Jace Peterson and Daniel Vogelbach about his machinations of an RPO offense. Peterson, a former cornerback at McNeese State, would be a viable quarterback or running back in Murphy’s scheme; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine what position Vogelbach would play.

“My concentration went away from me,” Murphy said.

The pitchers, too, perhaps.

Before the afternoon turned into a live action role play of the Baseball Bugs episode of “Looney Tunes,” it had every semblance of another spring dud for the Brewers, who have their fair share of clunkers in meaningless endeavors.

One day after nearly being on the wrong end of a perfect game against the Giants, the Brewers fell behind, 7-0, as opening day rotation member Chad Patrick got pummeled for a pair of home runs.

Then, the parade began. Dodgers pitchers stopped finding the zone, their fielders stopped gloving the ball and the Brewers bats were scorching hot under the Arizona sun. 

First, it was a 10-run fifth that lasted 32 minutes. Then, a nine-run seventh that spanned 29 minutes. Brandon Lockridge hit a grand slam. There was a three-run sacrifice fly. Eleven Brewers walked over the final five innings. Three of those came consecutively with the bases loaded. A pinch runner came back around to bat in the same inning he entered as a runner – and he homered. Nearly four hours elapsed.

Lockridge finished 3 for 5, while Jett Williams and Luis Rengifo also had multi-hit days. 

Prospect Brady Ebel was the pinch-runner-turned-batter in the seventh, and homered against the team his dad, Dino, is third base coach for. Ebel, the 32nd overall pick by the Brewers in last summer’s draft, spent his formative years at Dodger Stadium taking grounders and hitting batting practice with his father.

It was the second time that Brady has gotten in a game this spring against his dad’s team, although in both instances Dino, who’s serving as the third base coach for the United State in the World Baseball Classic, wasn’t in the opposing dugout. 

Sixty pitches were thrown in the top of the fifth. That was the most in a single inning in the Cactus League this spring …until two innings later when Dodgers pitchers Jack Dreyer, Kelvin Ramirez and Evan Shaw combined to throw 62. 

And yet it somehow got even worse.

The real backbreaker for those with dinner plans came in the top of the ninth. Lucas Wepf, a Class AA reliever, started the inning on the mound and went walk, single, single, walk, walk. He was offered clemency by Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who took the ball from him and handed it to Robby Porco, a 12th rounder a year ago who’s yet to make his professional debut, to inherit another bases-full mess.

Porco walked the first batter he faced. On four pitches.

The real hero of the day wasn’t Lockridge or Ebel or any of the hitters who hung 24 runs on the board, but rather a minor-league free agent signing named Joe Corbett, whose heroics included a three-up, three-down bottom of the ninth, bringing to an end the 3-hour, 54-minute goat rodeo.