National Association

About Early Team Names

By Patrick Mondout
February 29, 2008

We all have our pet peeves. I hate to see a politician with an alleged Ivy League education purposefully using a non-word like "dudn't" in order to sound like "one of the people." Others hate to see me refer to the original Athletic club as the Philadelphia Athletics or even the Athletics of Philadelphia (not to be confused with the later American League team, which actually was the Philadelphia Athletics). They will be as disappointed reading these pages as I have been these past seven years listening to presidential addresses.

Team names of the mid 19th Century were unusual by present day standards. Most of the nicknames of the 19th Century (and well into the 20th) were largely an invention of fans and (mostly) sportswriters. The St. Louis Brown Stockings club was not officially called the Brown Stockings. They were officially the St. Louis Club of St. Louis (a lousy name but certainly more accurate and less slippery than the "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim"), but sportswriters and fans called them the Brown Stockings due to the color of part of their uniforms.¹

See also: Knickerbocker Rules, 'Early Baseball' FAQs

Where a team actually had an obvious nickname in the early days, it was usually taken in the singular. For example, the team from Fort Wayne, Indiana was known officially as the Kekionga Base Ball Club of Fort Wayne. You might see them in the standings listed as "Fort Wayne" or perhaps Kekionga. It is natural for us moderns to want to call them the Fort Wayne Kekiongas (assuming we can even pronounce the latter) and you can in fact find many examples in the 19th Century of such pluralisms; either is "correct" though most purists will insist on the singular.

The Forest Citys of Cleveland, not Rockford.

Though it may annoy some to no end, I have decided to use both the contemporary and modern version of team names throughout. I will use the modern version most of the time and generally will only use the longwinded or archaic version when it seems appropriate to do so (such as on a team's page in the At A Glace box).

For example, I acknowledge the official name of the M.M. Van Dyke Base-Ball Club of New York at the top of their page. But they are referred to as the Van Dykes or the New York Van Dykes elsewhere. Questions of whether or not they were ever referred to in this manner by contemporaries are irrelevant with regard to these pages as this is an editorial decision on my part.

Another problem arises when I write a sentence like, "The Atlantics beat the Forest Citys 4 to 3." I mean the Forest City Base Ball Club of Cleveland and not, of course, the Forest City Base Ball Club of Rockford, but how would you know it? Thus I am forced to be longwinded and formal at times. By the way, the contemporary plural form for both was the Forest Citys, not the Forest Cities.

Both the Eckford Base-Ball Club of Brooklyn and the Henry Eckford Base-Ball Club of Brooklyn existed as contemporaries in the same city with virtually the same name. In summary: expect the team names to seem archaic, confusing, and/or inconsistent for 19th Century ballclubs.

NOTES:
1. It also became common to shorten "stockings" to "sox." The St. Louis Red Stockings of 1875 were referred to as the "Red Sox" by at least one contemporary newspaper.

National Association sources/bibliography:
Baseball: The Early Years by Harold Seymour.
Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search For The Roots Of The Game by David Block.
Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War by George B. Kirsch.
Blackguards and Red Stockings by William J. Ryczek
The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870 by Marshall D. Wright.
Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball by Warren Goldstein.
When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post-Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865-1870 by William J. Ryczek

David Nemec, the tireless 19th Century Baseball researcher, has also written a novel called Early Dreams, which takes place during this era and features real-life characters such as Cap Anson, George Wright, and Henry Lucas.

General Baseball History sources/bibliography:
Baseball: A History of America's Game by Benjamin G. Rader.
Baseball: A Film By Ken Burns (PBS DVD)
The Formation, Sometimes Absorption and Mostly Inevitable Demise of 18 Professional Baseball Organizations, 1871 to Present by David Pietrusza.
The Great 19th Century Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, 2nd Edition by David Nemec.
Early Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1825-1908 by Dean A. Sullivan.
Middle Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball, 1900-1948 by Dean A. Sullivan.
Late Innings: A Documentary History of Baseball 1945-1972 by Dean A. Sullivan
Past Time: Baseball as History by Jules Tygiel
America's National Game: Historic Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development and Popularity of Baseball by Albert Spalding
Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia by John Thorn, et al.