The Reds' 1876 Season

The St. Louis Reds made a good record during the season just closed, as will be seen by glancing at the record of the boys given below. During the season they played but one league club, the St. Louis Brown Stockings, which club they played six times, and were always defeated. The Ponies got in 21 runs to the Browns' 38 in the six games, which is not a bad showing. It will be seen by the summary given below that the Reds played ninety-one games during the season, of which they won sixty-seven, lost twenty-three, and one resulted in a tie. All yarn dead balls were used by the Reds when they put in balls, and during the season they did not play a single game with a live ball, and, considering that they had some crack pitchers to face, their batting record stands well-in fact, better than any other club in the country. Redmon stands higher than the great Barnes, of Chicago, and he did not have any live balls to punch, either.

Three "one-nothing" games were played by the Reds, two of them being victories, and one a defeat at the hands of the Syracuse Stars. Two remarkable games were played by the Ponies during the season-one with the Philadelphias, at Philadelphia on the 4th of last July, when the "Phillies" not only failed to make a run, but did not make a single base hit off Galvin in the game, while the Reds made but two errors and got in eleven tallies. The other game was that with the Cass Club, of Detroit, which was played at Iona, Mich., on the 17th of August. The Reds not only skunked their opponents, but did not let them touch first base during the game, not one base hit being made, and the Reds failed to make a single error, while they got in eleven runs on their side of the book.

-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 12, 1876

A couple of notes:

-That's a heck of a lot of statistical information on the 1876 Reds. If I was of a sabermetrical bent, I'd do something with those numbers.

-The comparison of the batting records of Billy Redmon and Ross Barnes, at the very least, neglects the issue of league quality. And that's about all I'm going to say about that.

-The more I think about Galvin's perfect game, the more amazing it seems. The Reds committed 855 errors in 91 games. That's 9.4 errors per game. Against the Cass Club, they played errorless baseball. Maybe it's right and proper that the defense get the credit for the perfect game in that context.