Cincinnati, Ohio: Where the Professional Game Was Born By ADAM I. ECOM, Founder
There is a recurring argument that gets made throughout every season in baseball, including Spring Training and the Postseason. Then it continues throughout the entire offseason. Then it repeats again.
Before delving any further into the argument itself, let us confirm the math reflecting the overall frequency of this argument. That’s every day, every week, and every month of every single year.
The Argument: Which city, team or fanbase truly is the heart of baseball, New York or Boston?
Indeed, more often than not, these are the only two choices provided. This argument is perpetual in nature, and shows no sign of slowing, no matter how exhausting and old this argument has become to many others that reject it, in large measure due to the lack of choices given in this apparently endless discussion.
Of course, keep in mind that this type of argument, is often presented in the form of a monologue, and usually initiated by someone from New York or Boston.
Now, nothing against those two cities. In fact, anyone that has read my writings on each of them, know that I fully respect them and they are great choices for such a debate. They should definitely be in the mix.
Although it is not enjoyable to be the bearer of bad news, your arguments are as old as the day is long. I hate to burst your bubble, but they are not interesting, nor are they intellectual, and do not provoke much thought. Give it a rest already and expand your horizons.
There are 28 other franchises and locations around baseball that uniquely contribute to the fabric of the league, with victories on the field, in the communities and beyond. Many of these worthy of being deemed baseball’s heart from time to time.
As I conducted some team research over these past few weeks, I came across some writings I had seen before, but for whatever reason they just did not click. This time they did. And so I ask the following: Why not Cincinnati. What a perfect choice to be included in any discussion regarding which place or team is baseball’s heart. In fact, how could you not include Cincinnati? At a minimum, it would certainly qualify as a candidate for such a distinction.
In fact, I would argue that any discussion with respect to who is the most the heart of baseball cannot start, and is not a serious and legitimate conversation if it does not include Cincinnati. Any argument without Cincinnati minimally as an option is ignorant, short-sighted and very elementary. Hardly even 101. Here is my argument for Cincinnati. Be prepared, this might be a different spin than that of our friends limiting discussion to only New York or Boston. We will then move directly into our broader look at Cincinnati baseball throughout the past 150+ years.
THE CLAIM VS. THE INCORPORATION RECORD
Walk into any baseball conversation and say Cincinnati invented professional baseball, and someone will immediately push back.
They will tell you about the Knickerbocker Club in New York, organized in 1845.
They will mention Hoboken, New Jersey, where the first recorded game under modern rules was played in 1846.
They will point to incorporation records and league charters and amateur clubs that predate the Cincinnati Red Stockings by two decades.
They are not wrong about the dates. They are wrong about what matters.
What New York organized in 1845 was a gentleman's club. Men of leisure playing a game on their afternoons off. No salaries. No accountability. No ambition beyond the recreation of it. Baseball before Cincinnati was a pastime — pleasant, local, and completely without consequence.
What Cincinnati did in 1869 was different in every way that counts. They hired men. They paid them. They built a schedule. They sent a team across the country by rail to compete against every serious club in America. They made baseball into a profession, and in doing so, they made it into an industry.
The Knickerbocker Club gave baseball its rules.
Cincinnati gave it its economy. Every contract, every salary, every franchise valuation, every card in a graded slab sitting in a collector's case right now. All of it descends from the decision Cincinnati made in 1869. You can argue about who organized first. You cannot argue about who made the game matter.
Cincinnati gave life to baseball. And baseball is life.
THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL GAME EVER PLAYED
On May 4, 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings played their first game as a fully professional baseball club. The opponent was the Great Western club of Cincinnati, a local amateur team that had no realistic chance against a roster of paid professionals. Cincinnati won 45-9.
It was not a close game. It was not supposed to be. The point was not the score.
The point was that men had been compensated to show up, to train, to prepare, and to perform at the highest level the sport had yet seen. The point was that baseball had crossed a line it would never uncross.
Harry Wright, the player-manager who built the 1869 roster, understood exactly what he was constructing. An English-born cricket player who had fallen in love with baseball, Wright approached the game with the precision of a craftsman. He recruited the best players he could find from across the country — his brother George at shortstop, Asa Brainard as the primary pitcher, Charlie Gould at first base — and he assembled them into a unit that operated with a discipline and coordination that amateur clubs simply could not match.
The Red Stockings then went on the road. And they did not lose.
Fifty-seven wins. Zero losses.
They traveled by rail to New York, to Boston, to Washington, to San Francisco. They played before enormous crowds who had never seen baseball executed at this level. They won in blowouts and they won in close games and they won against the best amateur competition the country could put in front of them. They went undefeated for over a calendar year.
When the streak finally ended in 1870 — an 8-7 loss in extra innings to the Brooklyn Atlantics before a crowd of 20,000 — the city of Cincinnati went into genuine mourning. Flags were lowered. The local press ran the story like an obituary.
That is how much this meant. That is how real it already was.
EXPELLED: THE BEER AND SUNDAY PROBLEM
In 1876, Cincinnati joined the newly formed National League — the direct ancestor of the league that operates today. And within four years, they were thrown out of it.
The charges: Selling beer at the ballpark; scheduling games on Sundays.
The National League of the 1870s was a deeply moralistic organization, dominated by ownership from the Northeast who viewed baseball as respectable entertainment for respectable people. Beer was considered lowbrow. Sunday games were considered sacrilegious. Cincinnati, a heavily German immigrant city with a strong beer culture and a working-class fanbase that could only attend games on their one day off, refused to comply.
The NL expelled them after the 1880 season.
Rather than disappear, Cincinnati helped found the American Association in 1882 — a competing major league that explicitly permitted beer sales and Sunday games. The American Association became known as the Beer and Whiskey League, and it worked. Cincinnati thrived in it.
By 1890, the American Association was collapsing and the National League came back to Cincinnati — this time on Cincinnati's terms. The franchise rejoined the NL and has operated there continuously ever since. The team that got kicked out for selling beer is now one of the oldest continuously operating franchises in the sport.
CROSLEY FIELD AND THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS CHANGED BASEBALL
For decades, Cincinnati played at a succession of grounds before settling into Redland Field in 1912 — later renamed Crosley Field in 1934 after new owner Powel Crosley Jr. acquired the franchise.
Crosley was a Cincinnati radio magnate who had built WLW into one of the most powerful broadcast signals in the country. He understood media, he understood reach, and he understood that baseball needed to grow its audience or stagnate. On May 24, 1935, he made history.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, sitting in the White House, pressed a telegraph key in Washington. Eight hundred miles away, the lights came on at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies played the first night game in Major League Baseball history before a crowd of 20,422 people.
The rest of the league resisted night baseball for years — Wrigley Field did not install lights until 1988. But Cincinnati understood something the traditionalists did not. Working people could not attend afternoon games. Night baseball meant a bigger audience, a broader fanbase, and a sport that belonged to everyone instead of just those who could afford to take an afternoon off.
That 1935 decision in Cincinnati changed the economics of the sport permanently.
THE WLW SIGNAL: HOW CINCINNATI BUILT A FANBASE ACROSS HALF THE COUNTRY
Powel Crosley's other gift to Cincinnati baseball was the radio.
WLW operated at 500,000 watts — the most powerful radio signal ever licensed in the United States. On clear nights, the station's signal carried across the entire eastern half of the country, reaching listeners from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf Coast, from the Atlantic seaboard west to the plains.
For generations of baseball fans in Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, and beyond, the Cincinnati Reds were their team — not because they lived near Cincinnati, but because on warm summer nights, WLW came in clear and the game was on.
The voices that carried those broadcasts became institutions. Marty Brennaman spent 46 years behind the microphone for the Reds, winning the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting excellence. Joe Nuxhall — a former Reds pitcher who had debuted in the major leagues at age 15, still the youngest player in modern MLB history — became his partner and one of the most beloved figures in Ohio history.
Their sign-off became a regional ritual. At the end of every broadcast, Nuxhall would close with: "This is the old left-hander, rounding third and heading for home." When he died in 2007, the phrase was engraved on his memorial.
That is what a radio signal built. Not just a fanbase — a community.
1919: THE CHAMPIONSHIP WITH A SHADOW
The Cincinnati Reds won the World Series in 1919. It is a fact that the history books record and the franchise counts. It is also a fact that has never been fully clean, and never will be.
Their opponent was the Chicago White Sox — a heavily favored team that many considered the best in baseball. Cincinnati won the series five games to three, and the city celebrated.
Eight months later, the sport learned that eight members of the Chicago White Sox had conspired with gamblers to intentionally lose the series. The Black Sox scandal — the most infamous corruption case in the history of American sports — cast a permanent shadow over the 1919 championship.
Cincinnati's players had nothing to do with the fix. They played the series honestly and won it legitimately. But the championship has never fully escaped the asterisk that the Black Sox put next to it, and the city has lived with that uncomfortable reality for over a century.
What the 1919 scandal ultimately did was harden the sport's stance on gambling — a stance that would come back, decades later, to define the career of Cincinnati's most famous player.
THE BIG RED MACHINE: THE GREATEST LINEUP EVER ASSEMBLED
If 1869 gave Cincinnati the founding claim and 1935 gave it the lights, the 1970s gave it immortality.
Under manager Sparky Anderson — a man so committed to pitching changes that the players nicknamed him Captain Hook — the Cincinnati Reds assembled a batting order that the sport has never seen equaled. They called it the Big Red Machine, and the name did not oversell it.
Johnny Bench was the anchor. Hands-down, he was the greatest catcher in the history of baseball. This opinion is far from being one that is regional. It is the consensus of every serious analyst who has studied the position. His arm eliminated the running game for any team that faced him. His power numbers from behind the plate were historically unprecedented. He was a two-time MVP and the defining player of his era.
Joe Morgan played second base with a level of baseball intelligence that bordered on supernatural. The little elbow flap before each pitch became iconic. Two consecutive MVP awards in 1975 and 1976. An on-base percentage and stolen base combination that gave the lineup a weapon at the top that opposing pitchers could rarely counter. Morgan generated combinations of fear and fumbles among opposing pitchers that were his unique creation.
Pete Rose played every inning of every game like it was the seventh game of the World Series. He ran out walks. He dove headfirst into bases at a time when nobody did that. He wore out his uniform from the inside. He was not the most gifted athlete on the roster — he was the most relentless and, in the long run, relentless wins.
Tony Pérez drove in runs. That was his function and he performed it with a quiet, consistent excellence that the flashier names around him sometimes overshadowed. He was the RBI engine of a machine that had plenty of horsepower.
Ken Griffey Sr. completed an outfield that had no weak spots and provided a professional hitter's approach that kept the pressure on opposing pitching from the first inning to the last.
Back-to-back World Series championships in 1975 and 1976. The 1975 Fall Classic — seven games against the Boston Red Sox, Carlton Fisk waving his twelfth-inning home run fair off the left field foul pole at Fenway Park at midnight — is still considered by most baseball historians the greatest World Series ever played. Cincinnati won it anyway. Then they came back in 1976 and swept the New York Yankees in four games.
The Big Red Machine did not just win. They made winning look inevitable.
KEN GRIFFEY JR. COMES HOME
In February 2000, Ken Griffey Jr. did something almost no superstar athlete in professional sports does willingly: he walked away from the largest market, the most money, and the most exposure — and went home.
Griffey had spent eleven seasons in Seattle, becoming arguably the most exciting player in baseball. The swing. The catches. The smile. He was the face of the sport through the 1990s in a way that few players have ever been. The Mariners had built their entire franchise identity around him.
And he asked to leave. Specifically, he asked to go to Cincinnati — the city where his father had played, where he had grown up around the game, where his family was. The Mariners granted the trade. Cincinnati gave up four prospects to get him.
The city received him like a returning hero. The expectations were enormous — perhaps unfairly so. Griffey's years in Cincinnati were defined as much by injury as by brilliance. He dealt with hamstring problems, knee problems, and a body that had taken the punishment of playing center field at the highest level for over a decade. The transcendent numbers of his Seattle years did not fully materialize in Cincinnati, and the local frustration with that reality was sometimes pointed.
But there were moments. A 40-home-run season in 2000. Stretches where the Griffey of Seattle reappeared and the ballpark held its breath. And underneath all of it, the knowledge that he had chosen this city over every other option available to him.
In 2008, Griffey returned to Seattle for a final season and a farewell. He retired in 2010. In 2016, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on 99.3% of the ballots cast — the highest percentage in the history of the vote at that time. He went in as a Seattle Mariner.
But Cincinnati is where he chose to go when he could have gone anywhere. That means something.
1990: WIRE TO WIRE
The 1990 Cincinnati Reds are the answer to a trivia question that most baseball fans get wrong.
Who swept the Oakland Athletics — the defending World Series champions, the team of Rickey Henderson and José Canseco and Dennis Eckersley — in the Fall Classic?
Cincinnati. In four games. As heavy underdogs.
Lou Piniella managed that team with a controlled fury that fit the city perfectly. The Reds led the National League West from Opening Day and never gave up first place — wire to wire, every single day of the season. They were picked by almost nobody to win the NL pennant. They won it anyway. They were picked by almost nobody to beat Oakland. They swept them.
Billy Hatcher went 7-for-12 in that series and set a World Series batting average record that still stands. The starting rotation — José Rijo leading the way — simply refused to give Oakland anything to hit. It was one of the most complete team performances in World Series history, executed by a team that the sport had largely dismissed.
That is a very Cincinnati outcome. Dismissed, underestimated, and then victorious.
PETE ROSE: THE BAN, THE LIFE, THE REINSTATEMENT
No figure in the history of the Cincinnati Reds carries more weight than Pete Rose, and no figure in the history of the sport has a story more genuinely complicated.
The all-time hits leader. 4,256 career hits — a record that has stood since 1985 and shows no realistic prospect of falling. A player who approached every at-bat with an intensity that made him simultaneously the most exhausting and most compelling man in any lineup he occupied.
And the man who, while managing the Cincinnati Reds in the late 1980s, bet on baseball. Bet on his own team. Was investigated, was found to have done it, and in 1989 accepted a permanent ban from the sport rather than face a formal hearing.
The ban meant no Hall of Fame. The baseball writers who vote for Cooperstown cannot vote for a player on the permanently ineligible list. Rose spent the next three and a half decades on the outside, oscillating between public contrition and public defiance, between autograph shows and tell-all interviews, between moments of grace and moments that made his supporters wince.
Cincinnati never stopped claiming him. Pete Rose Way runs directly to the ballpark. His statue stands outside it. The city's relationship with its most complicated son has always been one of clear-eyed loyalty — not blind defense of what he did, but an unwillingness to erase what he was.
In 2025, Commissioner Rob Manfred reinstated Rose posthumously. Rose had died in September 2024. The reinstatement cleared the path for Hall of Fame consideration — a vote that Rose himself never lived to see.
The final chapter of the Pete Rose story is still being written. But it was always a Cincinnati story first.
FROM CROSLEY FIELD TO GREAT AMERICAN BALL PARK
The Reds played at Crosley Field until 1970, when they moved into Riverfront Stadium — a circular, artificial-turf, cookie-cutter concrete bowl that was the architectural standard of its era and has not aged well in the memory of anyone who played or watched there.
Riverfront served the franchise through the Big Red Machine years and the 1990 championship, and it was demolished in 2002 after the Reds opened Great American Ball Park on the Ohio River in 2003.
The new stadium was the product of years of negotiation between the franchise, Hamilton County, and the city — a process that involved public funding debates, competing stadium proposals, and the parallel construction of Paul Brown Stadium for the NFL's Bengals next door. The Reds and Bengals share the riverfront footprint, which gives Cincinnati's sports district a density and energy on game days that few cities can match.
Great American Ball Park sits directly on the Ohio River. The batter's eye in center field features a riverboat design. The stadium plays as one of the more hitter-friendly environments in the National League, and in summer humidity, the ball carries. It is a park that fits its city — working-class bones with a genuine beauty in the right light, especially at dusk when the Kentucky hills across the river go gold.
SPRING TRAINING AND THE MINOR LEAGUE PIPELINE
Every February, when Ohio is still gray and cold, the Cincinnati Reds organization migrates to the desert.
Goodyear Ballpark in Goodyear, Arizona — approximately 20 miles west of Phoenix — serves as the Reds' spring training home in the Cactus League. The facility is shared with the Cleveland Guardians, making it an Ohio outpost in the desert where fans from both cities converge every March to watch rosters take shape before the season begins.
The Reds' primary AAA affiliate is the Louisville Bats, based in Louisville, Kentucky — just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. The proximity means that call-ups and assignments between the major league club and its top minor league affiliate can happen with unusual speed. Louisville has been a cornerstone of the Reds' development pipeline for years, and the relationship between the two cities — separated by less than two hours on I-71 — gives Cincinnati's farm system a geographic coherence that few organizations can claim.
A CITY THAT OWNS THE FOUNDATION
Cincinnati is not the biggest baseball market. It is not the most covered, the most discussed, or the most financially powerful franchise in the sport.
It is the franchise that made the sport a profession. The city that paid the first salary, played the first fully professional schedule, lit the first night game, and built a radio signal that carried baseball to half the country before television existed.
The Big Red Machine. The 1990 wire-to-wire champions. Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey Jr. coming home. A fanbase that has been paying attention longer than any other, forged by generations of radio broadcasts and riverfront summers and Opening Days that shut the city down.
On the banks of the Ohio River, where professional baseball was born, the fire is still burning.
— ADAM I. ECOM, Founder
UP NEXT
Next time we are back in Cincinnati, we are counting down the top moments, the top players, and the memorabilia that tells the story. Coming soon.
But first — we are visiting three more cities. Here is where they began:
Cleveland — A city that built its baseball identity on Lake Erie grit, waited 68 years between championships, and never once stopped believing the next one was coming.
Colorado — Baseball above the clouds. How a mile of altitude broke every pitching statistic ever written and forced the sport to confront physics it had never had to think about.
Detroit — The Motor City produced some of the most individually dominant seasons in baseball history, built on a foundation as industrial and uncompromising as the city itself.
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