Chicago White Stockings

The White Stockings won the National League's first pennant in 1876 and five more by 1886, six in eleven seasons. Fourteen seasons at 845-505, a rate of .626 that almost no club has matched over that long. The 1885 club went 87-25, the second-best winning rate any club has posted.

Cap Anson managed from 1879 to 1889 and won 732 games while playing first base throughout. He was the game's dominant figure of the era and also the one who pushed hardest to keep Black players out of it, which is the part of his record the Hall of Fame plaque does not carry.

Six Hall of Famers played here, among them Anson, King Kelly, John Clarkson, Al Spalding, who pitched and then went into sporting goods, and Hugh Duffy. Home was the Lake Front Park, whose short outfield fences produced a home-run total in 1884 that the league changed the ground rules to stop. The club became the Colts, then the Orphans, then the Cubs.