Cincinnati Reds

The Cincinnati Reds are a professional baseball team from Cincinnati, Ohio, playing in Major League Baseball’s National League Central division. They began as a charter member of the American Association in 1882 and moved to the National League in 1890. From 1969 to 1993, the Reds were part of the NL West, then shifted to the Central in 1994. The 1970s are widely seen as the franchise’s peak era, when they captured five National League pennants and two World Series titles.

That team, nicknamed the “Big Red Machine,” featured Hall of Famers Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Tony Pérez, along with Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, whose career remains controversial. More recently, the Reds have struggled; they hold the longest active playoff-series win drought in MLB, with their last such victory in 1995. Overall, the club has won five World Series championships, nine NL pennants, one American Association pennant, and ten division titles.

Home games are played at Great American Ball Park, which opened in 2003. Bob Castellini has been the team’s CEO since 2006. From 1882 through 2025, the Reds’ all-time record stands at a winning percentage of .—.

The team’s origins trace back to an earlier Cincinnati club expelled from the National League in 1880. That year, seven of eight NL owners agreed to ban beer sales and Sunday games, though neither was yet against league rules. Cincinnati’s president, W. H. Kennett, refused to sign the pledge, so the other owners expelled the team preemptively. In response, Cincinnati Enquirer sports editor O. P. Caylor tried twice to form a new league on behalf of the bankrupt franchise’s receivers.

After those attempts failed, he started an independent club in spring 1881, which beat a St. Louis team 12–3 in its first game. Later that year, Caylor and former Reds president Justus Thorner traveled to a meeting in Pittsburgh called by Philadelphia businessman Horace Phillips to discuss a rival league. No other owners showed up, and Phillips himself did not attend. By chance, they met former pitcher Al Pratt, who connected them with former Pittsburgh Alleghenys president H. Denny McKnight.

The three concocted a plan: they sent telegrams to each invited owner claiming everyone else had been enthusiastic and that a second meeting would be held in Cincinnati. The ruse worked, and the American Association was founded at Cincinnati’s Hotel Gibson. The new Reds, with Thorner as president, became a charter AA member. In 1882, led by third baseman Hick Carpenter, future Hall of Fame second baseman Bid McPhee, and 40-game winner Will White, Cincinnati won the AA’s first pennant.

When the Union Association formed in 1884, Thorner left to back the Cincinnati Outlaw Reds and secured the lease on the Reds’ Bank Street Grounds, forcing new president Aaron Stern to build League Park three blocks away. For the rest of their AA tenure, the Reds finished no higher than second and no lower than fifth.

On November 14, 1889, the Reds left the American Association and joined the National League alongside the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, after a dispute with St. Louis Browns owner Chris von der Ahe over selecting a new league president. The NL welcomed them partly because of the new Players’ League, an early attempt to break the reserve clause that threatened both existing leagues. After shortening their name to the Reds, the team spent the 1890s signing local stars and aging veterans, never finishing above third place (1897) and never closer than 10½ games from first (1890). In the early 1900s, the Reds had hitters like Sam Crawford and Cy Seymour, whose .377 average in 1905 gave the team its first individual batting title. Bob Bescher stole 81 bases in 1911, still a club record. Still, most of the decade saw the Reds in the league’s second division. In 1912, the club opened Redland Field.