The Cincinnati Red Stockings played their opening game of the 1875 season at Ludlow Base Ball Grounds, the team’s first riverfront field. (Drawing by Cam Miller)
By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
Opening Day is a hallowed tradition for Cincinnati Reds baseball fans. Thousands of them will flock to Great American Ballpark to watch the first game of the 2024 season in a city that’s widely recognized as the birthplace of professional baseball.
What most of those fans don’t know is that once upon a time Ludlow was the city where the historic franchise opened the season.
Artist replica of uniform style worn by Ludlow Base Ball Club players in 1875. (Provided by Cam Miller)
It happened in 1875, five years after the legendary Cincinnati Red Stockings team that had dominated the sport disbanded. During their absence, amateur baseball teams in Ludlow and Covington were drawing so many fans from both sides of the Ohio River that they joined the professional ranks in 1874.
That’s what prompted a group in Cincinnati to start a new Red Stockings organization in the summer of 1875.
“Businessmen in Cincinnati were like, ‘You know, with all these dollars partially from here going over to Kentucky, that means baseball is still hot,’” said Cam Miller, a local baseball historian who works for the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum. “So they opened up their checkbooks and got all the greatest players they could find who weren’t already taken and built back the Reds.”
Ludlow’s professional team played its home games at Ludlow Base Ball Grounds, a field tucked into a hillside that overlooked the Ohio River. Fans in Cincinnati were able to take a steamboat ferry that brought them directly to the grounds.
The home field for the new Red Stockings franchise in 1875 was still being built in Cincinnati so the owners came to an agreement to use the one in Ludlow. That’s where the Red Stockings’ first game was played on Monday, Aug. 9, 1875 and they came away with a 13-5 win over the Chicago White Stockings, which later became the Chicago Cubs.
Miller said the Ludlow field had a 1,200 seating capacity, but the return of the Red Stockings drew nearly four times that number with each ticket costing 50 cents.
A reporter who covered the afternoon game for the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper said one ferry boat “made trip after trip across the river, carrying to the Kentucky shore hundreds of people each time.”
“Once they realized the Reds were coming back everybody had visons of the undefeated 1869 team dancing in their heads,” Miller said of the large crowd. “For that one shining moment, to have 4,500 people in that little park, it was crazy how many people packed in there.”
People in Cincinnati who didn’t make it to the big game were able to keep track of the score as it went along.
According to the Enquirer article, a man sitting on top of the center field fence had red and white flags that he would raise and lower to indicate the score after each half inning. Someone on the opposite side of the river would then relay each tally via telegraph to a downtown saloon where the running score was posted.
The Red Stockings broke a 3-3 tie by scoring three runs in the seventh inning. The next time the “home” team came to bat, they knocked in seven runs to take a 13-3 lead over the visitors from Chicago.
At that time, the Chicago White Stockings were one of the teams in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP), the first fully professional league in baseball. The best team in the league that season was the Boston Red Stockings under player-manager Harry Wright.
Harry Wright brought his Boston Red Stockings team to Ludlow Base Ball Grounds for games in 1875. (Photo from National Baseball Hall of Fame)
Wright is the man who put together the Cincinnati Red Stockings professional teams that toured the country in 1869 and 1870. After that team disbanded, Wright and several of the players continued their careers in Boston and won four consecutive NAPBBP league titles from 1872 to 1875.
Wright returned to the area with his talented Boston team in June of 1875 to play a game against the Ludlow Base Ball Club. When the visiting team took the field, the players were all wearing jerseys with Boston stitched across the chest, except for Wright. He delighted the crowd by wearing his 1869 Cincinnati jersey with the classic old English “C” design on it.
Boston defeated Ludlow, 17-5, with Wright and his younger brother, George, each scoring three runs. They are two National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees who played at the historic Ludlow Base Ball Grounds where a business is now located.
“When you find all that out, it’s amazing,” Miller said of Ludlow’s professional baseball background. “Just the history that they had with that field and that team, it’s incredible.”
After the 1875 season, the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs was formed with Cincinnati as one of the eight teams. The league adopted the Five-Mile Clause that prohibited playing games against teams located within five miles of one of the league members.
Miller said Cincinnati was the team that proposed the Five-Mile Clause to protect its business interests. That’s what eventually led to the demise of the Ludlow Base Ball Club and Covington Stars since they were no longer able to play the National League teams of that era.
“It’s always been a business and it will forever be a business,” Miller said of big league baseball. “But at least we can say we had something special in this area that contributed to this unbelievable pastime that we have today.”
