November 8, 20224 yr As you know I love the history of the sport and have posted about Wild Bill Hickok and Tom Custer playing baseball. Today I came on an article about sport in the west that I thought was really fun - True West Magazine. " Baseball spread throughout the Old West around the late 1840s, and it was played regularly in many areas on a sandlot basis for the next 20 years. Then, in 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings—America’s first professional team—departed westward from St. Louis on a rail tour. In San Francisco, the Red Stockings played the local amateur team, the Eagles. The crowd, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, was gracious in defeat: “It is easy to see why they adopted the Red Stocking style of dress, which shows their calves in all their magnitude and rotundity. Everyone of them has a large and well turned leg and everyone of them knows how to use it.” The Red Stockings played to sell-out crowds throughout the tour. Enthused by their skill and the thrill of the game, the West went baseball mad. Over the next decade, cities and towns from the Missouri to the Pacific formed professional and semi-professional teams of their own." The Giants were not around and would be a NY team, but never the less this is the heritage of their era. Now here is their full road trip! " "The 20-game, June-long, 1,821-mile trip by the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. Three months later, they capped a 57-0 inaugural season with a 4,764-mile trip to San Francisco and back aboard the Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed only the previous May with the pounding of the Golden Spike at Promontory, Utah." " Once in San Francisco, the Red Stockings routed the opposition. The “Frisco” clubs, however, had one custom the Red Stockings were not familiar with. At the end of the sixth inning, the teams observed a 10-minute intermission, “a dodge to advertise and have the crowd patronize the bar,” Millar wrote. Away from the ballpark, the Red Stockings enjoyed the sights of the Bay Area. There was no Golden Gate Bridge or Coit Tower, but there was Chinatown and the Cliff House overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where sea lions perched on the rocks. On the Red Stockings’ final night in San Francisco, they were feted at a splendid banquet, and the next morning headed for home."
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