This Saturday we are going to talk again about baseball to learn more about one of the most special jerseys in this sport, that of the St. Louis Cardinals.
This Missouri team was founded in the 19th century (1892 to be more exact) and is one of the most successful in history. The first name of the team was not the Cardinals, but they started out being called the Brown Stockings, then they were simply called the Browns and for a year, with the particular name of Perfect.
The uniforms, which according to baseball tradition were white or gray (at home the first and away the second), had their embroidery and details in crimson redalso called cardinal red (cardinal In English).
In 1899, during a Perfectos match in Chicago, a young girl in the audience pointed out the color of the embroidery on the visitors’ jerseys: “What a beautiful cardinal you are!” The newspaper reporter Republic of Saint-Louis Willie McHale heard it and included it in his column. This is how the Cardinals nickname was born, and it was so successful that it was adopted as the official name the following year, 1900.
It happens that the cardinal or cardinal It is also a bird endemic to North America (Cardinal cardinalis), so that the nickname, born from the color, He began to identify with the bird.
In 1921, a young woman named Allie May Schmidt was commissioned to decorate the men’s club at the Presbyterian Church in Ferguson, Missouri. After seeing two red cardinal birds perched on a snowy tree branch, she thought a photo of the birds would pair well with the red carnations she planned to use as centerpieces for the club. He drew the birds on cardboard, cut them out and placed them on the tables. Some time later, Cardinals general manager, Branch Rickey, He saw Schmidt’s design and loved it, so much so that he decided to incorporate it as the club’s logo. Allie May Schmidt’s father, Edward H. Schmidt, was with Rickey when he saw the drawing. Since Schmidt Sr. was art director of Woodward & Tiernan Printing Co., he offered to adapt his daughter’s design for the Cardinals’ uniforms.
This is how one of the most recognizable sports uniform logo applications in history was born: a baseball bat on which two cardinal birds perchface to face, with the word “Cardinals” underneath.
Over time, another version was created with the name of the city under the bat and since then, with some back and forth and small variations, the emblematic jersey of the Cardinals (who in the 60s were the first MLS club to include the names of the players on the back) has been maintained until today.
I hope you liked this story. See you tomorrow.
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