More than 50 years before St. Louis had the first of its 11 World Series championships, a generation before its greatest player, Stan Musial, was born, and a couple of decades before the city’s team even had its current nickname, the Cardinals had a rival.
That team from Chicago has been there from the beginning, the oldest constant.
“The new St. Louis Club … is going to make a good fight for supremacy with its rival,” an article in The New York Times described, in 1875. “The St. Louis Club was not organized for the purpose of contending for the pennant so much as for becoming a permanent and formidable rival of the Chicago Club.