Sports Teams of St Louis
Sports fan are you now? Well, that isn’t an issue here in the Gateway to the West, which is home to a number of professional and collegiate sports teams. The Sporting News rated St. Louis the nation’s “Best Sports City” in 2000. and The Wall Street Journal named it the best sports city in 2015.
St. Louis has two major league sports teams. The St. Louis Cardinals, one of the oldest franchises in Major League Baseball (MLB), have won 11 World Series; one played against the old cross-city rival St. Louis Browns in 1944. The Cardinals’ 11 titles are second only to the New York Yankees’ 27. The St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League (NHL) appeared in three Stanley Cup finals from 1968 to 1970, and made 25 consecutive playoff appearances from 1979–80 to 2003–04.
St. Louis also has an extensive history in soccer, contributing at least one participant to each FIFA World Cup contested by the United States men’s team. The city is also the birthplace of corkball.
First off, we shall discuss the sport of baseball. In that sport, the St. Louis Cardinals represent the city with pride. The team was founded in 1882 and has been playing in the league since 1892. The team won its first World Series in 1926, winning its 11th and most recent in 2011. The team plays at the 43,795-seat Busch Stadium (the third ground to bear that name), and has a good view of the city’s famous Gateway Arch.
As for the other major sports here in St. Louis, there’s hockey, in which the St. Louis Blues represent the city. The St. Louis Blues are a professional ice hockey team in St. Louis. They are members of the Central Division of the Western Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). The team is named after the famous W. C. Handy song “Saint Louis Blues”, and plays in the 19,150-seat Enterprise Center in downtown St. Louis. The franchise was founded in 1967 as one of the expansion teams during the league’s original expansion from six to twelve teams. The Blues are the only surviving Expansion Six NHL team that has not won the Stanley Cup.
The first NHL team to call St. Louis its home was the St. Louis Eagles. The franchise moved, from Ottawa, in time for the 1934–35 NHL season. The Ottawa Senators had played in the NHL from 1917–1934. During that time the team had won the Stanley Cup in 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1920, 1921, 1923, and 1927. Following the Cup win in 1927 the team went on a sharp decline and in December 1933 rumors surfaced that the Senators would merge with the equally strapped New York Americans. This information was denied by Ottawa club president Frank Ahearn, who had sought financial help from the league. The team played the full 1933–34 season, transferring one home game to Detroit. Near the end of the season, reports surfaced that the club had entered into a deal with St. Louis “interests” to move the club. The team lost its last home game by a score of 3–2 to the Americans on March 15, 1934, before a crowd of 6,500. The final game of the season was a 2–2 tie with the Maroons at the Montreal Forum on March 18, 1934.
The Eagles would survive only one season, as the team continued to lose money due to high travel costs. At that time, the league only had nine teams, with St. Louis playing in the Canadian Division. The division consisted of two teams in Montreal (the Canadiens and Maroons), one team in Toronto (Toronto) and the New York Americans. The American Division hosted the Boston Bruins, Detroit Red Wings, Chicago Black Hawks and the New York Rangers. The Eagles would finish with a league-worse record of 11-31-6.