Entry in progress—B.P.
     
Wikipedia: St. Louis Cardinals
The St. Louis Cardinals are an American professional baseball team based in St. Louis, Missouri. The Cardinals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) Central division. Busch Stadium has been their home ballpark since 2006. With origins as one of the early professional baseball clubs in St. Louis, entrepreneur Chris von der Ahe purchased a barnstorming club in 1881, then known as the Brown Stockings, and established them as charter members of the American Association (AA) the following season. Upon the discontinuation of the AA, St. Louis joined the NL in 1892; at that time, they were called the Browns and the Perfectos before they were officially renamed as the Cardinals in 1900.
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As the “Perfectos”, the team wore their jersey with a cardinal red trim and sock striping. Later that season, St. Louis Republic sportswriter Willie McHale included an account in a column of a female fan he heard remarking about the uniforms, “What a lovely shade of cardinal.” Fans liked the moniker “Cardinals” and, the next year, popularity for the nickname induced an official change to Cardinals.
 
St. Louis Cardinals (official website)
1899
The Robison Brothers, Frank and Stanley, discarded the name of Browns, calling the St. Louis National Leaguers the Perfectos. The ownership also discarded the old Sportsman’s Park name in favor of League Park. The team was outfitted in red striped stockings and red-trimmed uniforms. When sportswriter Willie McHale, of the St. Louis Republic, heard a lady fan remark, “What a lovely shade of cardinal,” the new nickname was used in his column, and struck a chord with St. Louis fans.
     
16 April 1899, St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, “First Game Won By St. Louis,” pg. 16, col. 1:
The Clevelands had on their traveling suits of white stockings and gray trousers and shirts, a dingy effect contrasted with the new white suits and cardinal stockings and caps of the new St. Louis club.
 
Chronicling America
3 April 1900, The Republic (St. Louis, MO), pg. 6, col. 4:
GOOD PRACTICE FOR MR. TEBEAU’S TEAM.
Rochester Athletes Were Too Stiff and Sore to Give the Cardinals an Argument.
 
19 April 1900, St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, “League Park Game Has Begun,” pg. 1, col. 1:
LEAGUE PARK, St. Louis, Mo., April 19.—The baseball season of 1900 was opened here this afternoon in a blaze of sunshine and enthusiasm.
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Their new suits were the same as their garb of ‘99, white with red trimmings, except that the stockings, belt and cap seemed more of a cardinal hue.
 
25 April 1900, The Enquirer (Cincinnati, OH), “Cy Young,” pg. 4, col. 2:
ST. LOUIS, April 24.—Manager Tom Loftus, Cupid the captivator, and all other “Anarchists” from Chicago lined up against Mr. Tebeau’s Cardinals—Cardinals being the newest name of the otherwise Perfectos, due to a change in the club’s colors—and were defeated in a close but rather listless game this afternoon.
       
27 April 1900, The Enquirer (Cincinnati, OH), “Baseball Gossip,” pg. 4, col. 5:
Tom Loftus’s Anarchists made a grand rally at St. Louis yesterday in the ninth and won from Tebeau’s Cardinals by piling up six large runs.
 
29 April 1900, St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, “Won in the Tenth Inning,” pg. 22, col. 1:
It was good baseball that enabled the Cardinals to win.
 
30 April 1900, St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch, pg. 5, col. 1:
CARDINALS PLAYED GREAT BALL
 
1 May 1900, The Republic (St. Louis, MO), pg. 6, col. 4:
CALLAHAN AGAIN WINS FOR CHICAGO
Harper Starts to Pitch for the Cardinals but Doesn’t Last Long.
 
LA84 Foundation
19 May 1900, Sporting Life, pg. 2, col. 3:
ST. LOUIS VS. BROOKLYN AT ST. LOUIS MAY 14. (...) The home team played an errorless game, while Kelley’s high throw to first was responsible for one of the runs scored by the Cardinals.
 
31 May 1900, The Republic (St. Louis, MO), pg. 5, col. 1:
... the St. Louis Cardinals tied the Champions ...
 
10 April 1903, The Pittsburg Press (Pittsburgh, PA), pg. 22, cols. 3-4:
WINDY CITY LASS NAMED CARDINALS
Baseball Writer, Now Dead, Picked Up Nickname From the Lips of a Chicago Girl
THE NAME FITTED APPROPRIATELY
“How did the Cardinals get their appropriate name?” was asked of Manager Donovan by an ardent “fan” after Sunday’s great contest.
 
“A Chicago girl named them,” was Donovan’s surprising reply.
 
“Yes,” continued “Patsy,” “a Windy City lass discovered the cognomen, un consciously, and “Billy” McHale, then a well-known baseball writer, and at the time official scorer of the team, was the first to publish it.
 
“‘Billy,’ poor boy, is dead now, but the name that he picked up from the lips of the Chicago girl will live for many a day. McHale accompanied the team to Chicago about the middle of the season in 1900 and sat in the press box during the first game of the series.
 
“Sitting directly behind him was a young girl, whose keen visage took in everything of interest in the park. Shortly after McHale took his seat, ‘Patsy’ Tebeau and hi former Cleveland Spiders trotted out on the grounds.
 
“Attired in clean grey traveling suits, adorned with bright red trimmings, they presented a pretty picture as they crossed the field.
 
“Nor did the picture escape the bewitching orbits of the Chicago miss, who clapped her hands enthusiastically and exclaimed to her companion: “Oh! Isn’t that just the loveliest shade of Cardinal!”
 
“McHale caught the explanation and a moment later had flashed over the wires to St. Louis in his introduction of the game the intelligence that the ‘Cardinals’ were confident of victory.
 
“The name was what the sporting scribes and the ‘fans’ had been searching for. A dozen different sobriquets had been applied to the team, but it remained for a Chicago girl to unconsciously select the one that stuck.”
   
Riverfront Times (St. Louis, MO)
Ever Wonder How the Cardinals Got Their Name?
Posted By Aimee Levitt on Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 7:30 am
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In 1899, Frank and Stanley Robison, who owned the Cleveland Spiders, took over the St. Louis franchise and transferred many of their stars, including Cy Young, to the new team. (The 1899 Spiders set a new major league record for futility: They finished the season at 20-134 and subsequently got kicked out of the National League.) They also changed the team’s uniform to white with red trim with red-and-white-striped stockings.
 
Later that summer, Willie McHale, a columnist for the St. Louis Republic, reported that he’d overheard a lady in the stands pronounce the new uniforms “a lovely shade of cardinal.” McHale was, presumably, so charmed by the lady’s grasp of color names that he began referring to the team as the “Cardinals.” It was, after all, an age when teams were regularly—and unimaginatively—named after the colors of their uniforms (not only the aforementioned Brown Stockings, Reds and Red Sox, but also the Chicago White Stockings, Toledo Blue Stockings and Providence Grays) and “Perfectos” wasn’t very descriptive of the team’s record.
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Management didn’t start thinking of “cardinals” in terms of birds until the 1920s when it adopted the first incarnation of the birds-perched-on-a-bat logo and put it on the uniforms.