A name taken from a uniform colour.

Professional baseball in St. Louis began with the Brown Stockings of 1875, and English Wikipedia says the city joined the National League as a charter member in 1876 before being expelled after 1877. The franchise that became the Cardinals is usually dated to 1882, when the saloon and grocery owner Chris von der Ahe reorganised the club and made it a founding member of the American Association, a rival league. The team shortened its name to the Browns the following season, and when the American Association folded after 1891 it moved into the National League for 1892.

The colour came before the name. In its team ownership history for the Society for American Baseball Research, first published on 6 January 2017 and revised on 14 October 2021, Mark Stangl wrote that the brothers Frank and Stanley Robison, who took over the club for 1899, sent their team out on Opening Day, 15 April 1899, not in brown but in what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described as new white suits with cardinal stockings and caps. Stangl wrote that Robison gave the team no nickname, that the Post-Dispatch was calling it the Perfectos by 13 May 1899, and that “Cardinals” appeared in the St. Louis Republic on 3 April 1900, while other names such as the Red Caps also stayed in use.

The story of the name was set down decades later. Stangl wrote that official credit for coining “Cardinals” went to the Republic reporter Willie McHale, and cited a column by John Wray in the Post-Dispatch of 5 October 1931, in which McHale’s brother recalled a young woman at a game in Chicago admiring the red trim on the St. Louis road greys and calling it “a lovely shade of cardinal”. McHale put the phrase “The Cardinals” into his report, and Wikipedia says that by 1900 fans liked the name enough for the club to adopt it officially.

The old name went elsewhere. Wikipedia says that in 1902 an American League club moved from Milwaukee to St. Louis and called itself the St. Louis Browns, and the two clubs shared the city until the Browns left for Baltimore in 1953 to become the Orioles.

Saloonkeeper, brothers, a niece, a brewer and a group.

Stangl’s history divides the club’s ownership into a sequence of eras: von der Ahe from 1882 to 1898; the Robison brothers from 1899 to 1911; Frank Robison’s daughter Helene Hathaway Robison Britton from 1911 to 1916; a fan-share scheme known as the “Cardinal Idea” from 1917 to 1919; Sam Breadon, an automobile dealer, from 1920; Fred Saigh from 1948; the brewer Anheuser-Busch from 1953; and a group led by William DeWitt Jr. since the mid-1990s. Under the Cardinal Idea, Stangl wrote, shares were sold by subscription to raise money to buy the club from Britton, and the group brought in Branch Rickey, then business manager of the Browns, to run its baseball operations.

Breadon was named president on 13 January 1920, according to Stangl, with Rickey staying on as field manager, business manager and vice-president. Stangl dated the brewery’s arrival to 20 February 1953, when Saigh sold the Cardinals to Anheuser-Busch and its president, August A. “Gussie” Busch Jr. Wikipedia says the purchase prompted the Browns’ departure from the city later that year, leaving the Cardinals as St. Louis’s only major league club, and that the present Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis, which opened for the 2006 season, is the third Cardinals ballpark to carry that name.

The brewery’s era ended in the mid-1990s. Stangl wrote that on 26 October 1995 Anheuser-Busch announced the club was for sale so that the company could concentrate on its beer business, and that on 22 December 1995 it announced a deal to sell the Cardinals to a group led by William O. DeWitt Jr. as principal owner, with the investors Frederick O. Hanser and Andrew N. Baur, a group that committed to keeping the team in St. Louis. Wikipedia dates the completed purchase to 1996. DeWitt’s connection to the city’s baseball runs back further: Stangl wrote that his father, William DeWitt Sr., co-owned the Browns with his brother Charley from 1949 to 1951.

A group led by William DeWitt Jr. has owned the Cardinals since 1996. Wikipedia says DeWitt Jr. announced on 24 June 2026 that his son, Bill DeWitt III, would become the club’s chief executive officer, overseeing baseball and business operations, while DeWitt Jr. remained chairman and principal owner.

Design and documentation.

A baseball or basketball team carries its identity in a small number of places, and each one has its own rules. On a baseball cap the mark is usually reduced to a monogram or a single letter, sized to sit on a front panel and to read from the stands. On a jersey the same team may switch to a script wordmark, a looping hand-lettered name stitched across the chest, or to straight block lettering for numbers and player names on the back.

Basketball adds a large printed surface: the court. Centre-circle logos, painted keys, baseline wordmarks and the colour of the wood stain all become part of how a club looks on a broadcast. Arena signage, scoreboards and seat colours follow the same palette.

Mascots turn a logo into a costumed character for families and for merchandise, and they are often redesigned more freely than the crest itself. In recent seasons, city-edition uniforms and alternate sets have given clubs room to borrow local colours, neighbourhood names and period lettering without changing the primary mark. The guides in this series look at how each team handles those layers.

A church table decoration turned into a crest.

The club’s birds-on-the-bat emblem started on a dinner table. Stangl wrote for SABR that when the 1922 season began the players wore a new logo, two cardinal birds on a bat over the team name, meant to shift the meaning of the nickname from the colour to the bird. He traced the idea to a monthly dinner of the Fellowship Club of the Presbyterian Church in Ferguson, Missouri, where Rickey was the speaker and every table carried a decoration of cardboard cardinals on a twig made by a church member, Allie May Schmidt. Rickey wanted two pugnacious cardinals facing each other on a bat, and Stangl wrote that Schmidt’s father, Edward Schmidt, a commercial artist with the Woodward and Tiernan Printing Co., worked up the sketches that became the logo.

Wikipedia follows the mark through its revisions. The first birds perched on a black bat above “Cardinals” in printed letters; a version with “St. Louis” in place of the team name appeared in 1930 and served as the primary logo in 1931 and 1932. In 1951 the bat turned yellow. After a single season in 1956 with a script “Cardinals” and no birds, the emblem returned in 1957 with “Cardinals” written in cursive beneath the bat, the arrangement that, with incremental changes, has served as the logo since. Wikipedia says the birds were made more realistic in 1967, redrawn with more detail and bolder letters in 1998, and given yellow beaks and white eyes the following year.

The cap has its own history. Wikipedia says the interlocking “SL” appeared on caps or sleeves around 1899 or 1900 and largely disappeared in 1920, and that the interlocking “StL” arrived on caps in 1940 alongside navy blue as a uniform colour; it has appeared on the caps every year since, in slightly modified forms, with red caps in use from the mid-1960s and navy caps returning for road games at various points. In 1998 the club added a Sunday home cap showing a single cardinal on a bat. Wikipedia says a cream Saturday home alternate unveiled on 16 November 2012 put “St. Louis” back under the birds, a powder-blue Saturday road alternate followed in 2019, and the 2024 City Connect uniform, made in the Major League Baseball and Nike series, kept the birds on the bat over a script reading “The Lou”, with wavy pinstripes alluding to the Mississippi River and a sleeve patch carrying a fleur-de-lis and the Gateway Arch. The costumed mascot is Fredbird, a cardinal in the team’s uniform.

For a design guide, the St. Louis Cardinals show how a colour noticed on a sock, a church table decoration and a printer’s sketch can harden into a crest that has outlasted several owners and ballparks. Compare it with MLB, the league whose batter silhouette sits on the same uniforms, and Chicago Cubs, the rival whose predecessor, the Chicago White Stockings, faced the Browns in the 1880s. For this guide we use cardinal red, navy and bat yellow with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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