Please, try to get it right

One of the most persistent and annoying myths in baseball is that the Cincinnati Reds are the continuation of the mighty Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first fully professional club, that dominated base ball in 1869 and 1870 until their epic defeat at the hands of the Atlantic Club in Brooklyn.

Once again, this wholly inaccurate assertion has made its way into wide coverage. From an article on MLB.com today by Mark Sheldon:

Inside Great American Ball Park, the crowd was a sea of the color red for both the Reds and, likely, the Cardinals, too. The Reds, whose franchise was founded in 1869, have the honor of opening at home every season.

Let's get it right, shall we? After the 1870 season, the Red Stockings' wealthy backers pulled the plug, and the team was disbanded. The club continued, fielding an amateur team as it had before 1868, for some unknown time. Some of the professionals, meanwhile, followed Harry Wright to Boston in 1871, where he formed a new Red Stockings club that still plays today. You may know them as the Atlanta Braves, and those of us with a more romantic view of the game's history like to regard them as the modern day Cincinnati Red Stockings. Certainly it's a defensible argument, that the old Red Stockings split into professional and amateur halves and continued as two clubs. The Chicago Cubs, who play the Braves today in a far more appropriate opening day celebration, formed in 1870 as the White Stockings, and have played continuously ever since apart from a brief break in the aftermath of the Chicago Fire.

Meanwhile, Cincinnati had a National League entry in 1876, which played five seasons before folding, largely in a dispute with the league over beer sales. The modern day Reds began life in the American Association in 1882, and jumped, along with the Brooklyn club you may know as the Los Angeles Dodgers, to the National League in 1890.

My colleague Andrew Ross suggests that perhaps the original NL club barnstormed a while before joining the AA. I find this difficult to believe, but as he says, the best you gain from that is an 1876 date for the modern club anyway. 1869? Earlier? Forget it.

However, I will accept the notion that the Reds' mascot is the continuation of Rollie Fingers.

Perpetuating the myth

The above is a screen grab from Yahoo! which shows a breathtaking ignorance of baseball history. I shouldn't be surprised. For what it's worth: the present day Cincinnati Reds can be traced to the 1882 Cincy squad, which was the first champion of the American Association. The club jumped to the National League in 1890, and has remained there ever since.

An earlier National League Cincinnati franchise was formed in 1876, and lasted until 1880, when they were kicked out of the league for selling beer on Sundays. There is no relationship between these two clubs.

On the other hand, the original all-professional base ball club was the Cincinnati Red Stocking Club of 1868. The club itself was formed in 1866, but the importing of players with paid contracts began in 1868, when Harry Wright recruited a team in earnest. By 1869, the club was by far the best in the country, but never got to play for the NAABP championship - at the time you became champion by beating the incumbent, and the quirks of the Cincinnati schedule denied them a shot. In 1870, after an 89 game winning streak, the Red Stockings finally lost to the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, in an eleven inning epic at the Capitoline Grounds. The aura of invincibility gone, crowds dwindled and the money dried up. The club's executives decided not to field a nine for 1871 in the new professional National Association, and the team was disbanded, although an amateur nine carried on in its stead.

If you must identify a modern club as the oldest professional club, either try the Cubs, which can be directly traced back to the Chicago White Stockings of 1870, or the Atlanta Braves. When the Red Stockings were disbanded, Harry Wright was hired to captain a new franchise in Boston. He brought many of his Cincinnati players along, and the new team was dubbed the Red Stockings. They became the Boston Braves, and moved to Milwaukee in 1953, then Atlanta in 1966. Romantics among us like to think that the franchise, in some sense, moved along with Harry Wright.

One thing is certain, though: the modern day Reds are absolutely not the oldest professional baseball team.