If you ask someone “who are the Browns?” they can likely come up with the obvious answer, the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League, one of the oldest teams around with a storied history.  But there was a time when the color brown was a bit more popular in sports nomenclature.

In Baseball there were the St. Louis Browns.  In fact there were numerous iterations of the St. Louis Browns: the future Cardinals and the future Orioles (both teams changed to birds, odd).  Such monochrome names really lend their legacies to that first professional baseball club, the Cincinnati Red Stockings.  As I wrote over here, teams in the earlier years of baseball didn’t really have much in the way of official names, but rather nicknames derived from uniform elements or some kind of regional connection.  The Reds had amassed a good deal of popularity in a barn storming tour in which they thoroughly dominated.  So in 1875 the Brown Stockings came about.  The team lasted for three seasons before going belly up.  There was a game fixing scandal with the Louisville Grays that sent both teams out of business. Read the full story