Milwaukee’s Proud History of Baseball — and Socialism
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Organizers like to say that all politics boils down to a battle between organized money and organized people. Candidates with the largest war chests tend to win, but contenders who refuse to take donations from corporate interests can prevail if their supporters are well-organized, inspired, and strategic. Likewise, big employers can spend huge sums on union busting, but employees can win union organizing drives if they know how to mobilize workers to stick together and not be intimidated.
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The same is true in baseball. Teams in big markets with large payrolls have a decided advantage when it comes to recruiting talented players who command huge salaries, but feisty, scrappy teams with fewer stars can sometimes win championships. Since 2000, more than 80 percent of the teams that have advanced to the World Series ranked in the top half of league payrolls. Teams with the five largest payrolls (out of thirty teams) account for roughly 38 percent of all World Series contestants and nearly half (48 percent) of all World Series champions.
But this year is an exception: the World Series contestants — the Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays — are both among the poorer teams in baseball. Milwaukee is Major League Baseball’s smallest market in terms of population size and TV audience and ranks nineteenth in payroll ($143.5 million). Tampa Bay is twenty-fifth in market size and ranks twenty-sixth in payroll ($98.3 million).
The top-spending teams are the New York Mets ($346.8 million) and the Los Angeles Dodgers ($338 million). Despite the disparity, the Brewers swept the Dodgers in four games in the National League Championship Series to make it to the World Series, thwarting LA’s hopes to win three consecutive World Series. The Brewers and Rays won their respective leagues by combining strong pitching, agile and savvy “small ball” play, and because of managers who utilized their rosters to get the most out of teams without many highly paid superstars.
During the first half of the twentieth century, in both politics and baseball, Milwaukee’s have-nots often beat the odds. And indeed, those two histories are intertwined in ways not often appreciated.
Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialists
In the early 1900s, Milwaukee’s socialists came to power by forging an alliance with the city’s labor movement. The city’s culture was heavily shaped by German immigrants, whose athletic and gymnastic clubs embedded the ideal of a “sound mind in a sound body.” One of them, Turner Hall, built in 1883 near the city’s downtown, served as a gathering place for Milwaukee’s radicals and socialists. It provided its members a place to socialize, listen to music, drink beer, and discuss politics. Eugene Debs gave his first speech as a Socialist there in 1898 and spoke at Turner Hall on many other occasions. (It remains a popular site for meetings and performances, with a gym in the basement.)
One of Turner Hall’s members was Victor Berger, an Austrian Jewish immigrant who spearheaded the Socialist Party’s rise to local power. Berger was a schoolteacher, an editor of two newspapers (one in German, another in English), and a skilled organizer. He and Debs helped found the Socialist Party of America (SP) in 1901. Berger built the Milwaukee branch into a formidable political machine. He secured the backing of the unions, including the powerful brewery workers’ locals and most German and Polish immigrants. The SP sponsored carnivals, picnics, singing societies, and even Sunday schools, conducting their campaigns in English, German, and Polish.
In 1910, Milwaukee voters sent Berger to Washington as the country’s first socialist congressman. He lost his seat in 1912 but was elected again in 1918 and in a 1919 special election; both times the House refused to seat him because of his opposition to World War I. He returned to Congress in 1922, served three terms, and lost his seat in 1928.
Berger sponsored bills for old-age pensions, government ownership of the radio industry, abolition of child labor, self-government for the District of Columbia, and a system of public works to provide relief for the unemployed. He also sponsored resolutions to withdraw federal troops from the Mexican border, for the abolition of the Senate (which was then not yet elected directly by the voters and was nicknamed the “millionaires’ club”), for women’s suffrage, and for federal ownership of the railroads.
While none of Berger’s proposals gained much traction in Congress, his comrades in Milwaukee were a dominant force in the city’s civic life. In 1912, some 1,200 SP members held public office in 340 cities and towns across the United States, including Socialist mayors in Schenectady and Berkeley; Socialists would later win the mayor’s office in Minneapolis (1916) and Reading (1927). But Socialists’ most enduring success emerged in Milwaukee. Between 1910 and 1960, Milwaukee was led for nearly forty years by three Socialist mayors — Emil Seidel (1910–12), Daniel Hoan (1916–1940), and Frank Zeidler (1948–1960) — and also boasted a number of city council and school board members.
“The workers of our city are its most valuable asset,” Seidel, a woodcarver and union leader, said in his inaugural address. During his two-year term, the city adopted an eight-hour day for municipal employees and increased their minimum wage from $1.75 to $2.00 a day. In 1910, the city added chlorine to the lake water, which sharply reduced the incidence of typhoid. A few years later, following a huge outbreak of diarrhea, the city stopped mixing raw sewage with drinking water.
Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan, circa 1930 (San Fransisco Examiner / CC BY 4.0)Opposed by Milwaukee’s business establishment, Seidel lost the 1912 election. That year he was the SP’s vice-presidential candidate, running alongside Debs. They gained 6 percent of the national vote, 8.4 percent in Wisconsin, and 27 percent in Milwaukee County.
In 1916, the Milwaukee Socialists made a dramatic comeback, catapulting city attorney Daniel Webster Hoan into office. Hoan served as mayor until 1940. Detractors initially mocked them as “sewer socialists,” because they focused heavily on solving practical problems, not on revolutionary Marxist ideas. In 1936, Time magazine put Hoan on its cover and praised Milwaukee as “one of the best-run cities in the U.S.”
Milwaukee’s voters kept reelecting Hoan because he ran efficient and humane administrations, showing it was possible to both expand public services and balance the city’s budget. The socialists expanded public education for the city’s working-class children (including free textbooks, lunches, and dental and medical programs), created an adult education program for workers, expanded the public libraries and playgrounds, and improved teachers’ salaries.
In 1923, Socialist Charles Whitnall — a onetime city treasurer and founder of the Commonwealth Mutual Savings Bank for workers — created a master plan for a network of beautiful parks and protected the city’s Lake Michigan lakefront from development, to ensure the working class would have access to the beaches and other recreation areas. As a result, Milwaukee had the nation’s best municipal park system. In 1923, the Socialists built the country’s first city-sponsored public housing project, Garden Homes. They inaugurated a public bus system to replace the street trolleys that ran down the middle of the road, causing accidents and injuring pedestrians.
Under Hoan, the Socialists adopted tough factory and building regulations and inspections, reined in police brutality against striking workers, improved working conditions for rank-and-file cops, and sponsored public markets. They gave preference to union shops for city contracts for everything from printing to horseshoeing. Hoan pushed for a law that allowed the mayor to close any factory if the employer refused to negotiate with the workers. The Socialists forced the city’s private streetcar company to pave the streets, lower fares, improve service, and pay fees to the city in exchange for its monopoly. They opened a municipal quarry to provide crushed rock for street projects, built a municipally owned water system, and created a pioneering sanitation infrastructure.
In 1925, the city built the Jones Island water treatment plant, one of the first facilities of its kind, and still in operation. From the start, Milwaukee recycled its sewage sludge as Milorganite (for Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen), a fertilizer used on parks, golf courses, and lawns around the country. The treatment plant is now run by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District. It sells about 47,000 tons of Milorganite each year, which generates over $12 million in annual revenue for the city, turning a waste management cost into a major revenue stream.
In 1932, voters elected Socialist labor lawyer Max Raskin — great-uncle of Jamie Raskin, currently a progressive congressman from Maryland — as city attorney. A close Hoan ally, Raskin was attacked by a conservative newspaper for refusing to prosecute “communistic rioters” — meaning strikers and protesters. Raskin required his assistant city attorneys to end any employment in private practice, which had been a source of corruption and conflicts of interest.
Zeidler, the third Socialist mayor, was elected in 1948. He was a popular figure who shared the progressive values of his socialist predecessors, but by then the business community had gained greater influence; at least one major employer threatened to fire employees who voted for Zeidler.
During his twelve years as mayor, the city doubled its geographic size by annexing nearby areas. In 1957, Fortune magazine called Milwaukee one of the two best-governed large cities in the country. During his time as mayor, Milwaukee’s black population nearly tripled, reaching 8 percent of the population by 1960. Among other measures, Zeidler pushed for the construction of racially integrated public housing. His political enemies tried to use his strong support for the civil rights movement against him, including spreading false rumors that he had erected billboards in the South urging African Americans to move to Milwaukee to take advantage of its liberal welfare programs.
Business Ascends, Milwaukee Declines
After Zeidler left office, the city was governed by several business-friendly mayors, which coincided with the city’s dramatic decline starting in the 1960s, from the eleventh to the thirty-first largest city in the country. Its population dropped from 741,000 people in 1960 to about 562,000 today, 23 percent of whom live below the poverty line. Banks fostered white flight to the suburbs by redlining Milwaukee’s neighborhoods. Today the Milwaukee area is one of the most racially segregated regions in the country.
Milwaukee’s economy has never recovered from the massive job and population decline. A. O. Smith, the giant manufacturer of water heaters, boilers, and car frames, founded in 1874, still has its global headquarters in Milwaukee, but its production plants are now located in the American South as well as China, Mexico, India, and Turkey. Almost eight thousand union employees once worked at its factory on the city’s northwest side. After being abandoned for many years, the site is now an industrial park, but the number of employees is a small fraction of the former A. O. Smith workforce.
Milwaukee was once home to brewery giants like Pabst, Schlitz (which promoted itself as “the beer that made Milwaukee famous”), Blatz, and Miller. In 1905, Milwaukee had 3,809 brewery workers in just eight major companies. It reached its peak in 1953, when Milwaukee had over 7,100 unionized brewery workers. Today a conglomerate called Molson Coors dominates the local beer industry. It employs about 1,200 people in Milwaukee in its main Miller brewery and its corporate offices. Many local draft breweries dot the area, but they produce a relatively small volume per worker compared to the large factories that once called Milwaukee home.
Bill Veeck, Baseball’s Radical Owner
Milwaukee’s working class embraced baseball as well as socialism. The city was home to minor league, employer-sponsored, semi-pro, and amateur teams. It was a hotbed for talent, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1900, at least sixty-three Milwaukee natives have played in the majors, including such stars as Al Simmons (originally Aloysius Szymanski) and Tony Kubek (both of Polish descent) and Ken Keltner and Harvey Kuenn (both from blue-collar families of German ancestry). About another two hundred major leaguers have come from the rest of Wisconsin.
Bill Veeck, pictured in 1944 while recovering from injuries sustained in World War II (US Marine Corps)Starting in 1878, Milwaukee sponsored several teams in the early days of professional baseball, none of which lasted for more than a few years. Teams called the Brewers participated in the Western Association from 1888 to 1891, the American Association in 1891, the Western League from 1892 to 1899, and the American League in 1900 and 1901. The longest-lasting franchise, from 1902 to 1952, was the Brewers team in the top-level minor league, the American Association.
The Brewers, as well as the Negro National League’s Milwaukee Bears (1923) and the Milwaukee Chicks of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (1944), played at the quirky, wooden Borchert Field, a privately owned stadium on the city’s North Side. Built in 1888 to accommodate five thousand spectators, its capacity grew to eighteen thousand after several expansions.
Ironically, baseball’s greatest maverick, Bill Veeck, then only twenty-seven, purchased the bankrupt, last-place minor-league Brewers in 1941, the year after Hoan was defeated for reelection. Born in 1914, Veeck grew up in baseball. His father was a sportswriter who wound up as president of the Chicago Cubs. He dropped out of college after his father died and did odd jobs for the Cubs. He had an unusual appreciation (for a white fan) for Negro League players.
He put together a syndicate of investors to buy the Brewers, a struggling Triple-A team in the American Association. He was the last owner to purchase a baseball franchise without an independent fortune. During his five seasons as Brewers owner, Veeck revolutionized the game.
Veeck was both a shrewd businessman and a radical reformer. He voted for perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas even after Thomas had died. “I’d rather vote for a dead man with class than two live bums,” he later said.
Veeck loved to sit in the bleachers and hang out with the working-class fans. He packed Borchert Field during World War II by scheduling Brewers’ games in the morning so that workers on the late shift at war plants could attend games. He also served a breakfast of cornflakes at the game. He staged free days for cab drivers and bartenders.
In Milwaukee, Veeck began giving away promotion prizes — caps, a keg of nails, bottles of soda, pizza, and even animals (turkeys, geese, pigs, lobsters, and rabbits) — to attract fans to the park. Veeck modernized and cleaned the stadium’s restrooms specifically to make the ballpark more welcoming to female fans, a vastly underserved market at the time. He gave away orchids to women fans on Mother’s Day. He staged weddings at home plate.
Satchel Paige in 1947 (ACME Newspictures)Sportswriters dubbed him “the [P. T.] Barnum of Baseball.” But he wasn’t just a showman. Despite a shoestring budget, he took the Brewers from last place in 1941 to a second-place finish in 1942, followed by three consecutive American Association pennants from 1943 to 1945; the Brewers’ attendance shattered minor league records. Veeck used similar promotional strategies when he purchased the Cleveland Indians in 1946. He owned the St Louis Browns (1951–53) and bought the Chicago White Sox (1959–1961, 1975–1981).
Throughout his life, Veeck was an ardent anti-racist. When he purchased the Brewers, he inherited the team’s spring training facility in Ocala, Florida. During one game, Veeck decided to sit in the “colored” section of the stands. The local police showed up, told him he couldn’t sit there, and ordered him to move, threatening to arrest him for violating Florida’s Jim Crow laws. He told the town’s mayor that he’d move the team’s lucrative spring training program out of Ocala if they arrested him. They didn’t, but he moved the Brewers anyway.
In 1947, Veeck’s Cleveland Indians hired Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League. The next year, he made Negro League star Satchel Paige, then forty-two-years old, the first black pitcher in the league. That team won the 1948 World Series. He joined the local NAACP and appeared, along with Doby and Paige, on a poster designed to recruit new members to the civil rights organization, featuring the phrase, “The NAACP gets the ball for you.” When he owned the White Sox, he canceled the team’s spring training reservations at Miami’s McAllister Hotel when it refused to accommodate black players, moving the entire team to another hotel. In 1970, he testified in federal court on behalf of Cardinals’ African American outfielder Curt Flood, who was suing major league baseball to overturn the reserve clause, baseball’s version of indentured servitude.
Veeck expressed his socialist views when it came to baseball’s business side, too. At meetings of owners and in public statements, Veeck argued that wealthy teams in big markets should share revenue with teams in small markets to level the playing field and create a competitive balance. He contended that when his lowly St Louis Browns played the prosperous New York Yankees, they were entitled to a 50 percent share of the Yankees’ local television revenue, observing, “We’re half the show. They can’t play the game without us.”
The other owners hated Veeck and his ideas. Boston Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey called Veeck “that damned socialist.”
Corporatization Comes for Baseball
After Veeck sold the Brewers, the team stayed in Milwaukee as a minor league franchise. In 1953, the corporate-backed Greater Milwaukee Committee finished construction of a new stadium with the explicit goal of attracting a major league franchise to the city. Their plan had some elements of the socialists’ focus on public works and recreational infrastructure, but it was hardly on behalf of the city’s working class.
County Stadium opened in April 1953 as the first major ballpark in the United States financed entirely with public funds. The new ballpark enticed the Boston Braves to Milwaukee. In 1952, the minor league Brewers had attracted 195,839 fans to Borchert Field. The following season, the Braves lured 1.8 million fans to County Stadium. To increase revenue, the stadium was also used for Green Bay Packers football games, religious services, concerts, ice skating, and other large events.
In 1957, the Braves, with stars like Hank Aaron, Warren Spahn, and Eddie Mathews, won the National League pennant and defeated the Yankees in the World Series. That season, attendance at County Stadium reached 2.2 million, first among the sixteen major league teams. The next season, the Braves again faced the Yankees in the World Series but lost four out of seven games.
The team’s on-field performance and attendance declined steadily after that. In 1965, only 555,584 fans showed up, as the Braves slipped to fifth place in the National League, while Milwaukee suffered from the loss of jobs and population. The following year, the team moved to Atlanta.
In 1970, as part of MLB expansion, car dealer Bud Selig brought together a group of investors and persuaded the other owners to approve another major league team in Milwaukee. He purchased the bankrupt Seattle Pilots, moved them to Milwaukee, and named the new team the Brewers after the minor league team he grew up watching.
The Milwaukee Braves play at County Stadium in September 1960. (Robert Jahnke / CC BY 2.0)Starting in the late 1980s, Selig threatened to move the team out of Milwaukee if the state government didn’t build a modern, retractable-roof stadium. He claimed that the aging County Stadium couldn’t generate the revenue need to keep the team competitive, such as sales of luxury suites. In 1995, with the support of local business leaders, the politicians complied, enacting a 0.1 percent regional sales tax across five Wisconsin counties, in addition to funds from the state, county, and city.
Like its predecessor, the new stadium was built with public funds. Although business and civic leaders called it a public-private partnership, it was little more than crony capitalism. Taxpayers paid for the stadium but, under the lease agreement, didn’t share in the Brewers’ profits. The public paid $609 million to pay off the building costs, borrowing interest, and maintenance. The Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, known as a right-wing philanthropy, provided a $20 million loan.
The Brewers’ contribution was less than $40 million, almost all of it from the Miller Brewing Company, which paid the team that amount for naming rights. As a result, the stadium was called Miller Park from its opening in 2001 until the conclusion of the 2020 season. Despite investing so little in the ballpark, the Brewers own 36 percent of the facility, while the state-created Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District owns the rest.
In 1998, Selig’s fellow owners named him baseball commissioner, and he put his financial stake in the team in a trust managed by his daughter Wendy. The family sold the Brewers in 2005 to Los Angeles investor Mark Attanasio, who still owns the team.
Twenty-two of Major League Baseball’s stadiums currently have corporate naming rights deals. In 2020, the Brewers switched their ballpark’s name from a brewery company’s to that of an insurance corporation. American Family Insurance, ranked 226 on the Fortune 500 list, with $19.6 billion in revenues, signed a fifteen-year agreement to pay about $4 million a year to change the stadium name to American Family Field.
Milwaukee’s early socialists would certainly be outraged that even though the stadium is publicly owned, the Brewers control corporate sponsorships and stadium naming rights and have used their political clout to block efforts to get the legislature to split sponsorship revenues equally between the team and the state. If the socialists still ran the city, or if Bill Veeck still owned the team, the Brewers might be playing in Victor Berger Field or Daniel Hoan Stadium.
Miller Park, now American Family Field, in 2005 (Jeramey Jannene / CC BY 2.0)In 2023, the Brewers persuaded Wisconsin lawmakers to subsidize renovations of American Family Field for around $500 million. Ryan Clancy, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member who serves in the Wisconsin State Legislature and was previously a member of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors, was an outspoken opponent of using public funds for stadium renovations, which he calls “corporate socialism” and “corporate welfare.” Clancy thinks tax revenues should focus on local services such as public transit, parks, public safety, and housing, rather than subsidizing Attanasio’s team.
Attanasio paid $223 million to buy the Brewers in 2005; by 2016, the franchise was worth $875 million. Today the team is worth $1.9 billion, according to Forbes.
Baseball has been totally corporatized since Bill Veeck’s day. His entire career was devoted to baseball, and he was always in financial distress. In contrast, Attanasio, the latest Brewers’ owner, made his initial fortune with the private equity firm Crescent Capital Group. He not only owns the Brewers but is also majority shareholder of English football club Norwich City and part-owner of the American Hockey League’s Milwaukee Admirals. He is also on the board of directors for LA28, which oversees plans for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Although he’s hardly a progressive, much less a socialist, he is one of the few baseball owners who primarily contributes to Democratic candidates.
Although he has a net worth of $1.9 billion, Attanasio is among the poorest of the thirty MLB team owners. The wealthiest is Mets owner Steve Cohen, a Wall Street hedge fund tycoon with a net worth of $22 billion. Second is Edward Rogers III, who owns the Toronto Blue Jays and is worth $11 billion, according to Forbes. He inherited the telecommunications and media empire founded by his father, which includes Rogers Wireless, Rogers Cable (Canada’s largest cable TV provider), forty-six radio stations, seventy consumer and trade magazines, and the Blue Jays.
Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ largest shareholder, ranks third, with an estimated net worth between $7 billion and $13 billion. Walter is cofounder and CEO of the financial conglomerate Guggenheim Partners. Last year, he bought a majority stake in the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and sold it just fourteen months later to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner (Jared’s younger brother) at a $12.5 billion valuation — $2.5 billion more than the team was valued at when he bought it. Walter is also co-owner of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks and is a major investor in England’s Chelsea football club.
The Brewers didn’t win their first pennant until 1982, when they played in the American League, and lost to the St Louis Cardinals in a seven-game World Series. The team shifted to the National League in 1998. It finally won another pennant this year, leading the majors with 103 wins.
Out of Left Field
Debates over socialism are now shaking up both baseball and politics. By 1993, the revenue and payroll disparities in the MLB had become untenable. The small-market franchises were struggling to keep up with escalating player salaries in larger markets: the Yankees’ television and radio income was $47 million, while the Brewer’s collected only $5.5 million.
It wasn’t until the 1990s — following a strike by the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) — that baseball’s moguls adopted a version of Veeck’s decades-old revenue-sharing plan (although without giving him credit). Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was one of those who fiercely resisted any proposal to redistribute revenue. “I’m a charitable guy,” he said. “But I don’t like the idea of a socialist state. The Yankees shouldn’t be punished for their success.”
In January 1994, the owners approved a plan to pool local broadcasting and gate revenues to aid small-market clubs. But they made their plan contingent on the players’ union agreeing to a salary cap. The MLBPA rejected the deal, which it saw as a way to suppress player earnings and restrict the free-agent market. The owners rebuffed the union’s counterproposal, which included a luxury tax on the sixteen highest-payroll teams and putting 25 percent of all gate receipts into a pool that would be shared with the lowest-payroll teams.
The impasse led to a 232-day strike that canceled the 1994 World Series. It only ended in 1995 when federal judge Sonia Sotomayor (now a US Supreme Court justice) issued an injunction against the owners.
The collective bargaining agreement, finalized in 1997, severed revenue sharing from the idea of a salary cap. Under that landmark agreement, wealthy, large-market clubs transferred a portion of their local revenues to small-market teams, and a luxury tax was placed on high-spending teams to fund the revenue-sharing pool meant to level the playing field.
Despite these reforms, there’s still a wide gap in revenue and payroll between the thirty teams. Both the NFL and NBA have much more progressive formulas for leveling the playing field. MLB rules don’t require teams to spend their additional revenue on payroll. On average, teams spend about half their total revenue on salaries, but the range is dramatic. The Mets allocate about 90 percent of their revenue on player salaries, for instance, while the Marlins spend only 26 percent of their $317 million revenue on payroll.
Fans in some small markets have accused their teams of treating revenue-sharing as a profit center, not as a way to create a competitive balance. The Brewers are the most generous spenders among small-market teams, investing 41 percent of revenue into player salaries. But the small-market teams have a hard time retaining their best players because they can’t match the salary offers of the wealthier teams. The most expensive players are not going to play in Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Miami, or Tampa Bay.
Baseball’s owners and the union are currently in the middle of negotiations over the next collective bargaining agreement. Under current Commissioner Rob Manfred, the owners are more adamant than ever that the union must agree to a salary cap. Close observers believe that it could lead the owners to initiate a lockout.
Many fans view baseball’s labor-management battles as a conflict between billionaires and millionaires. Twenty-seven of baseball’s thirty owners are billionaires. Only Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort (worth a mere $700 million), Miami Marlins owner Bruce Sherman ($500 million), and Cincinnati Reds owner Bob Castellini ($400 million) fall below the threshold.
Meanwhile, thanks to the players’ union and the end of the reserve clause in the 1970s, players’ salaries and working conditions have improved dramatically. The average player salary is $5.34 million, but this is heavily skewed by a small number of star players with enormous contracts. The median salary — $1.4 million — provides a more realistic picture. But even that figure is misleading, because the typical major league career is only five years. Most players are only short-term millionaires.
Attendance at major league games this season reached 71.7 million, close to the highest on record. The thirty teams generated $12 billion in revenue this year, the second highest amount in the sport’s history. The typical cost for a family of four to attend a major league game ranges from $159 for the Miami Marlins to $413 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. In most major league ballparks, the workers who clean the stadiums, sell the food and concessions, and work in the parking lots are unionized with UNITE HERE or SEIU, but these are seasonal jobs and many of the employees have a hard time making ends meet. Baseball’s owners can afford to reduce the price of tickets, parking, and concessions for fans, and improve wages for stadium employees, without placing a cap on player salaries.
The cost of attending baseball games is part of the nation’s affordability crisis, itself a symptom of the widening gaps in wealth and income. It is one reason why socialism is gaining traction. Polls show growing support for socialism over capitalism, while the number of socialists elected to office is skyrocketing. Membership in DSA reached over 120,000 this year, a huge increase in just a decade.
These trends are reflected in Milwaukee. The local DSA chapter has grown from 350 members in 2025 to about one thousand today. (Madison, the state capital and home to the University of Wisconsin, has a similar number of members.) The dramatic spurt in members across the state made it possible for Francesca Hong, one of four DSAers in the state legislature, to come close to winning the Democratic nomination for governor this year.
Alex Brower, a thirty-nine-year old DSA member and former union organizer, was elected to Milwaukee’s city council in 2025. He grew up in Wisconsin and is a stalwart Brewers fan. He is thrilled that his team will be in the current World Series. But he also views Major League Baseball as a big business that cares more about its profits than the lives of its customers (the fans) or its working-class employees.
The Milwaukee DSA chapter has been waging campaigns to municipalize the city’s private utility, restrict the repressive forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, protect tenants from unscrupulous landlords, and support workers’ union drives. Brower would eventually like to see DSA and its allies wage a campaign to bring the Brewers under public or community control, similar to the arrangement that governs the nearby Green Bay Packers.
Even though a government agency owns American Family Field, “the Brewers get all the benefits and the community gets nothing,” said Brower. He noted that zip code 53206, which is just a few miles from the stadium, is one of the poorest areas in the state. “The Brewer’s merch is flying off the shelves,” he said, while some of the poorest Milwaukeeans are paying a sales tax to finance and fix up the ballpark. “The rest of us have to pick up the tab, including paying for the cops who direct traffic on game days, and the wear and tear on the streets.”
“Milwaukee’s brewery workers were socialists,” Brower explained. “So shouldn’t the Milwaukee Brewers reflect that legacy?”
Daniel Hoan couldn’t have said it better.
This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.