Cardinals

Stan Musial spent his entire career in a Cardinals uniform, and by the time he retired he held the club's records for hits and home runs. The line running through St. Louis baseball is long enough to hold him alongside Rogers Hornsby, whose two batting Triple Crowns came decades earlier, and Bob Gibson, who took the 1968 National League MVP and two Cy Young awards on the mound. What connects them is a franchise that has stayed in one city since a team purchased and reorganised by Chris von der Ahe joined the American Association in 1882. It wore the names Brown Stockings, then Browns, then Perfectos before settling on Cardinals in 1900, a nod to the red of the uniforms rather than to the bird itself.

The Cardinals moved to the National League in 1892 and built their identity there, helped by an innovation from executive Branch Rickey, who set up the modern minor league farm system and fed the club's rosters through the 1920s and beyond. Fifteen division titles sit alongside that record, three from the club's years in the National League East and twelve more since it moved to the Central.

Busch Stadium, the current version opened in 2006, seats just over 44,000 and continues a line of home grounds stretching back to Sportsman's Park in 1882. The rivalry that matters most now runs up Interstate 55 to Chicago, against the Cubs, a fixture old enough to carry three separate names — the Cardinals–Cubs rivalry, the Route 66 rivalry, the I-55 rivalry — depending on who is telling it. Before the Cubs took that place, it belonged to the crosstown Browns, in matchups known as the Streetcar Series.