The Red Stockings: The First Professional Season

On March fifteenth, eighteen sixty-nine, a Cincinnati attorney named Aaron Champion hired a former English cricket player named Harry Wright to organize, manage, and play for a new baseball club. Wright did something that had never been done openly before: he put all ten players on salary. The Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first openly all-professional baseball team.

They played their first game on May fourth, eighteen sixty-nine, and beat the Great Westerns of Cincinnati by forty-five to nine. Then they kept winning.

The eighteen sixty-nine Red Stockings went fifty-seven and zero, the only perfect season in professional baseball history. They traveled by the newly completed Transcontinental Railroad to San Francisco, the first baseball team to tour the continent. They played before crowds that had never seen the game played at this level. Harry Wright's brother George was the shortstop; he was widely considered the best player in the country. The salary Harry paid him was fourteen hundred dollars for the season.

The streak ended on June fourteenth, eighteen seventy, in Brooklyn, when the Atlantics beat them eight to seven before a crowd of twenty thousand. The Cincinnati team had won eighty-one consecutive games by then, counting into the following season. When they finally lost, the loss was front-page news across the country.

The Red Stockings disbanded after that season. The model they had established, that baseball was a business and players were professionals, did not disband. The National Association formed in eighteen seventy-one, the National League in eighteen seventy-six. Cincinnati's franchise eventually joined and became the Reds, one of the oldest continuous franchises in professional sports.

The color red, chosen for those first stockings, stayed.