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The first openly professional team ever was called the "Cincinnati Red Stockings," but it is not the same team as the modern Cincinnati Reds. The Reds like to claim that they are the same club, but it just isn't true. That team disbanded after the 1870 season, and many of the people involved re-formed the club as the Boston Red Stockings the next year. The Red Stockings would go through various names but eventually settle on Braves, so if anybody can make a claim to the legacy of that first professional team, it's Atlanta.

The current Reds are actually the third team to bear some version of the name. You'd think that they already have enough history of their own, without trying to steal somebody else's.

Sorry, bogus historical claims are my personal pet peeve.

Love the Mr. Redlegs patch, though.

It would be nice if this was a simple, black-and-white question with a yes or no answer. But it is not. There is a sequence of clubs with slightly different memberships and organizational structures. But there are also intimate links of common membership and organizational structures between these clubs.

There was a great deal of meaningful continuity between the various baseball clubs between the 1869 Red Stockings and today's Reds, continuity that belies the claim that these were unrelated clubs with nothing to do with one another and no shared history. There are also important formal breaks, including a gap of several years between the relocation of some parts of the Red Stockings club to Boston and the establishment of a new club in Cincinnati. Yet many of the same people were involved in each of the Cincinnati clubs in either side of these formal breaks, the clubs came into existence in succession to one another, they had the same name, and were organized to do the same thing.

So while the 2007 Reds are not the same club as the 1869 Red Stockings, the 2007 Reds are descended in important and meaningful ways from the 1869 Red Stockings. (And are the same club as the 1882 Cincinnati Red Stockings.) The Reds overstate the institutional relationship to the earlier clubs, of course, but it's a sin of exaggeration, not of invention.

Beautiful new uniforms, though! I say bring back the pillbox caps. :D

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Well, we can debate how much connection there really was between the 1869 and 1871 Cincy clubs, especially since large parts of the original club relocated to Boston (and took the name with them).

To my mind, the Reds' claim is right up there with the Nationals' "ESTABLISHED 1905." The same name as a historical team does not a connection make. Should the Brewers start publicizing 1888 as their date of founding?

Back on-topic, I would love to see somebody bring back a pillbox cap. The Reds are as good a candidate as any.

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