St. Louis Brown Stockings

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The St. Louis Brown Stockings were a professional baseball club based in St. Louis, Missouri from 1875 to 1877. Joining the National Association (NA) in the final season of that league, the Brown Stockings were the first team to represent St. Louis in a professional baseball association (Spink 1911). The original Brown Stockings, or Browns (different from the St. Louis Browns or future Orioles), were a charter member of the National League in 1876 and completed the first two NL seasons.

Like the White Stockings in Chicago (est. 1870), the Brown Stockings in St. Louis (est. 1875) adopted uniforms and acquired a nickname by descent with variation from the famous Red Stockings of Cincinnati (est. 1869), the first professional baseball team, which garnered much public interest due to an undefeated streak during a barnstorming tour in 1869-1870.

The Brown Stockings played their games at Grand Avenue Grounds, which later would be the site of Sportsman's Park. Brown Stocking George Bradley pitched the very first no-hitter in major league history, on July 15, 1876.

The Brown Stockings slipped to 28-32 in 1877 after going 45-19 and finishing third in 1876. The team signed stars Jim Devlin and George Hall from the Louisville Grays, only to become embroiled in a game-fixing scandal that resulted in the permanent expulsion of Devlin and Hall (and two other Grays players) from the league. The Grays and Brown Stockings both went out of business in the aftermath of the scandal. A few years later, a new baseball club in St. Louis reused the Brown Stockings colors and nickname. The new Brown Stockings, soon called Browns, were a charter member of the American Association in 1882 and they survive today as the National League St. Louis Cardinals.

[edit] See also

[edit] References and external links

  • Team index page at Baseball Reference
  • Cash, Jon David. Before They Were Cardinals: Major-League Baseball in Nineteenth-Century St. Louis. 2002, U. of Missouri Press, 320 p.
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