The History of the St. Louis Cardinals
The early days of baseball in St. Louis are rather confusing. The best explaination I have found was on a webpage about the St. Louis Browns.
The history of St. Louis baseball in the twentieth century reads like a city with two tales. The Cardinals had originally been the St. Louis Brown Stockings, owned (from 1882 to 1898) by the cantankerous Chris Von der Ahe, one of the most colorful individuals the game had ever seen. With the failure of Von der Ahe's American Association, coupled with the demise of the Players League in 1891, the Brown Stockings were allowed to enter the National League, which had increased to 12 teams. Von der Ahe decided to manage the team itself, and they finished in eleventh place with a 56-94 mark, just ahead of the original Baltimore Orioles. By 1899, the Browns, who had shed their drab brown uniforms, changed their color to cardinal red, inspiring the birth of a new name and with it a new identity.
In 1901, former Western League magnate Bancroft Johnson established his American League as a bona fide rival for the attendance dollars of the National League. He felt it imperative that the league be competitive with its National rivals in their major cities. He urged the original Milwaukee Brewers, who had finished in last place with a 48-89 record under Boston great and future Hall-of-Famer Hugh Duffy, to make the move to St. Louis. The Brewers, whose name could easily have been at home in the beer-loving city of St. Louis, dropped their maiden sobriquet in favor of the former name of the St. Louis Browns, and the Mound City now had two teams for the limited baseball dollar. The first move the Browns, owned by Robert Hedges, made was to raid the roster of their new rivals the Cardinals. This ensured that there would be bad blood between the two teams for years to come.
The first edition of the St. Louis Browns in 1902, vastly improved by the likes of Cardinal jumpers Wee Willie Sudhoff, Dick Padden, and Jesse Burkett, finished in second place. A great many St. Louis fans quickly shed their Cardinal allegiances and switched to the Browns. In 1908, owner Robert Hedges made so much money that he built the finest and first concrete stadium the league ever had.
With the failure of the Federal League, a rival third major league, in 1915, St. Louis Terriers owner ice magnate Phil Ball was allowed as part of the league settlement to buy the Browns from Hedges. He started to implant his authoritarian personality on the franchise. His unbending will and lack of baseball expertise had a disastrous effect on the future of the Browns in St. Louis. Their eventual demise could be traced to three errors in judgment that dominated his tenure of ownership from 1915 to 1933.
The Browns had working for them the man with probably the most ingenious and innovative mind in the history of the game. Wesley Branch Rickey had been the team's field manager from 1913 to 1915, but it was in the front office that his cerebral powers and organizational abilities were best implemented. Rickey had an immediate and irreconcilable personality clash with the new owner on his aversion to profanity and his own strong-willed way of doing things. His charismatic nature was at opposite poles to the forceful interference of Phil Ball, who regarded the team as his expensive hobby. It was just a matter of time until Rickey tired of Ball's manner and found more suitable surroundings. Unfortunately for the St. Louis Browns, he did not move far enough away. Rickey joined the Cardinals amid the furor of a lawsuit by his previous employer.
The Cardinals on the other hand were the lineal descendants of the original St. Louis Brown Stockings, dating their origins back to 1883. Even today many otherwise knowledgeable baseball fans confuse these names. The current St. Louis Cardinals date their official ancestry from 1892, even though they were known as the Browns until 1899 when they changed the team colors and were called the Cardinals, a name they have worn proudly since. The original name was that of a color, much like the Stanford University Cardinal. The team's avian identity did not appear until 1925.
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