The Cincinnati Reds are a Major League
Baseball team based in Cincinnati, Ohio. They are in the Central
Division of the National League.
The original Cincinnati Red Stockings,
baseball's first openly all-professional team, were founded as
an amateur club in 1863, and became fully professional in 1869.
The Red Stockings won 130 straight games throughout 1869 and 1870,
before being defeated by the Brooklyn Atlantics. Star players
included brothers Harry and George Wright, Fred Waterman, and
pitcher Asa Brainard. The 1869 Red Stockings made an eastern swing
of 21 games and went undefeated. According to Walter Camp, the
team received a banquet and a "champion bat...this rather
remarkable testimonial was twenty-seven feet long and nine inches
in diameter". The following year, the team lost only one
game. They were defeated at the Brooklyn Atlantics' Capitoline
Grounds. According to Camp, the Red Stockings lost 8-7 in 11 innings.
The game apparently served as a precursor to today's unruly crowds
because he wrote: "A crowd of ten thousand people assembled
to witness this match, and so lost their heads in the excitement
as to give the Western men a very unfair reception." [See:
"Base-Ball For The Spectator", Walter Camp, Century
Magazine October, 1889.]
The best players of the Cincinnati Red
Stockings relocated to Boston after the 1870 season, taking the
nickname along with them and becoming the Boston Red Stockings,
a team later dubbed the "Beaneaters" and eventually
the "Braves", who are now based in Atlanta. A new Cincinnati
Red Stockings team became a charter member of the National League
in 1876, five years after the first Red Stockings team. The second
Red Stockings team was expelled from the league after the 1880
season, in part for violating league rules by serving beer to
fans at games, and for their refusal to stop renting out their
ballpark, the Bank Street Grounds, on Sundays.