Washington Blue Legs

The Washington Nationals were the first important baseball club in the nation's capital. They played part of one season or parts of two seasons in the National Association, the first professional league, so they are considered a major league team by those who count the NA as a major league. Several baseball clubs in Washington have used the historic name Nationals.

The team may also be known as the Washington Blue Legs, and played their home games at the Nationals Grounds and the Olympics Grounds. According to Retrosheet, they played two seasons in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players as the Nationals, playing 11 games in 1872, and 39 games in 1873. But according to Baseball-Reference, the franchise lasted just the 1873 season, and were nicknamed the Blue Legs.

The first team in Washington, the Potomac Club, was formed in the summer of 1859, and the Nationals were formed in November of the same year; both teams consisted mostly of government clerks. The two teams practiced in the backyard of the White House and played each other in the spring of 1860; the Nationals consistently lost to the superior Potomacs, but the latter disbanded on the outbreak of the Civil War while the Nationals kept playing, and by the end of the war were "solidly in the esteem of Washington fans, with the club's shortstop, slight, 23-year-old Arthur Pue Gorman, the darling of the spectators. Young Gorman quickly rose to stardom on the not-too-brilliant Nationals." (Gorman later became a U.S. Senator from Maryland and a power in the Democratic Party in the late 19th Century).

In the summer of 1865 the Nationals invited the Philadelphia Athletics and Brooklyn Atlantics, two of the major teams of the era, to Washington, losing to the former 87-12 and to the latter 34-19, before 6,000 spectators, including President Johnson. They "jealously guarded their amateur status by refusing all payments, including travel expenses."

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Wikipedia