Cincinnati Red Stockings

[2] The ball club's first home field was at a location stated as "the foot of Ninth Street, in the Mill Creek bottoms.

His first team may have been local to a man, but he both developed and imported players to represent the club in competitive play for the 1868 season.

As for most hosts on that tour, it was a "bad loss" on the scorecard but an instructive one for Cincinnati: the players, the club, the fans, and perhaps the local newspapers.

[citation needed] Their commercial tour of continental scope, visiting both Boston and San Francisco, was unprecedented and may be essentially unrepeated.

The Red Stockings remained one of the few strongest teams on the field, losing only six games, but attendance declined badly, especially at home.

More than 2,000 people greeted the team when it arrived in San Francisco at 10:00 p.m. "They really helped nationalize the game and put Cincinnati on the map as a baseball town," said Greg Rhodes, a Reds historian who wrote The First Boys of Summer (Road West Publishing Company, 1994), along with Cincinnati Enquirer reporter John Erardi, about the 1869–1870 Red Stockings.

[citation needed] On June 14, 1870, after 81 consecutive wins since assembling as the first openly professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings lost 8–7 to the Brooklyn Atlantics before a crowd of 20,000 at the Capitoline Grounds.

Bob Ferguson scored the winning run in the 11th inning on a hit by pitcher George Zettlein.

Wright persuaded three Cincinnati teammates to join the 1871 Boston Red Stockings in the first professional league, as it turned out.

Ex-Cincinnati Red Stockings moved around some (see the note on Team members) but Boston retained both Wright brothers throughout the five years of the National Association.

[11] For 1871 the Nine split between two teams in the new all-professional National Association: Gould, the Wright brothers, and McVey with the Boston Red Stockings; Brainard, Allison, Sweasy, Waterman, and Leonard with the Washington Olympics.

Substitute Hurley is also a "major leaguer" for his brief play with the Olympics in 1872, although that club went out of business midseason and he did not return to the league.

Andy Leonard rejoined Gould, the Wrights, and McVey in Boston for 1872, the first of four consecutive championship seasons there.

Before Cincinnati hired its team for the 1869 season, the strongest clubs were located from Washington to Troy, New York.