The Early History of the Cincinnati Reds

The Cincinnati Reds are, of course, America’s oldest professional baseball team. While baseball was being played as far back as the late 1850s, it was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, founded in 1866, that were the first team to pay every player on their roster beginning in 1869.

The first team they faced as a fully professional club is a point of debate. Some sources say it was another team from Cincinnati called Great Western, while others claim it was a club known as the Mansfield Independents from Northeast Ohio. Still, others claim it was a team called Antioch whom the Reds defeated 41 to 7 on March 15, 1869.

In any case, the season ended on November 6th of that year with 17 to 8  win over the New York Mutuals to cap a perfect 57-0 season. The Red Stockings' first loss wouldn’t come until June 14th of the following year, when they fell 8 to 7 to the Brooklyn Atlantics.

Soon other clubs became professional teams and in 1870 the first major league was formed, the National Association. The Red Stockings, however, did not join that circuit which lasted through 1875. Instead, then club president A.P.C. Bonte insisted the club return to amateur status for the 1871 season, mostly to save money.

The team’s first home field in those early days was Lincoln Park Grounds, later called Union Grounds which was located where Union Terminal stands today. It had a capacity of 4,000. In 1876, the team moved two miles north to the slightly smaller Avenue Grounds. That same year, the Red Stockings returned to professional status joining the newly formed National League along with teams from Boston, Chicago, Hartford, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.  

However, the National League gave the Red Stockings the boot in 1880 when team president W.H. Kennet refused to sign an agreement banning beer at the league’s ballparks as well as the use of the stadiums for any purpose on Sundays. A new version of the Red Stockings was formed and continued on as an independent team playing their games at the Bank Street Grounds. That site is covered by I-75 near Bank Street in Over-the-Rhine today.

In 1881, a rival to the National League was formed as the American Association(AA) was organized at the Hotel Gibson in Cincinnati with the new Red Stockings a charter member. The team spent eight seasons in the AA, winning the pennant in 1882.

The club returned to the National League in 1890, shortening its name to simply Reds. The American Association lasted one more season with the Red Stockings eventually being replaced in that circuit by the Cincinnati Kelly Killers for the 1891 season. That team took its name from its star player and manager King Kelly and played its home games at East End Park site of the Schmidt Ball Fields today.

In 1884, while still members of the American Association, the team moved into League Park just a few blocks from the site of the old Union Grounds. That was replaced in 1902 with the Palace of the Fans, the first baseball park in America to have a distinct architectural style. It was inspired by the architecture of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The only flaw was it didn’t have enough seats to hold the growing number of fans. In 1912, Redland Field replaced the Palace of the Fans on the same site. In 1934, the stadium was renamed Crosley Field in honor of the team’s then owner, Powel Crosley Jr.

The Reds early years back in the NL proved unspectacular. Stars of the 1890s for the team included Ohio native Buck Ewing and the shockingly inappropriately nicknamed William “Dummy” Hoy, baseball’s first mute player. For three years the club was managed by the legendary Charlie Comiskey, who also covered first base. It is Hoy, incidentally, who is credited with inspiring the development of hand signals for safe and out calls.

After moving into Redland Field in 1912, the team sputtered along until 1919 when they captured their first NL pennant with a record of 96 and 44, nine games ahead of the New York Giants. That placed the Reds in the World Series against the Chicago White Sox. That series, won by the Reds, was marred by a betting scandal involving the White Sox, which is a fascinating story on its own, and one will cover in a future post, as well as the rest of the Reds’ history.