The original Cincinnati Red Stockings made history — below the knee.

By winning a lot of games in a row, the amazing, road-tripping, undefeated 1869 Red Stockings helped make baseball a truly national sport. They were also the first baseball club to wear the knicker-style uniform, the prototype of every baseball uniform worn today, and they made the bright red stockings that it exposed into an outrageously popular trademark. Baseball clubs ever since have imitated the Red Stockings by wearing distinctively colored or patterned socks. Fans today may not realize it, but the White Sox, Reds and Red Sox are not the only professional franchises who took their names from the color of their socks. So did the Kansas City Royals (named after the color royal blue), the St. Louis Cardinals (named after the color cardinal red) and many others.

In the 1860s well-dressed women wore wide, bell-shaped skirts that brushed the ground. They wore a lot of clothing underneath, including stockings -- wool, silk or cotton, depending on economics and the weather -- but in those days stockings were not normally on public display. We exaggerate the modesty of our Victorian ancestors; a glimpse of stocking was probably not as shocking as Americans today think. Showing more lower leg, however, had erotic impact, judging by photographs of mid-19th-century prostitutes, who often pose lifting a skirt to the knee and staring insolently at the camera.

The male calf also had appeal. The Red Stockings’ uniform pants stopped at the knee; below that the players wore tight red wool stockings. In 1869 the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “It is easy to see why they adopted the Red Stocking style of dress which shows their calves in all their magnitude and rotundity. Every one of them has a large and well-turned leg and every one of them knows how to use it.”

Celebrity, of course, can have more sexual power than the human body or even sex itself. In the middle of their sensational undefeated 1869 season, the Cincinnati Red Stockings came to Philadelphia, where a newspaper described what happened after the Red Stockings defeated the local Athletics, 21-4.

“The evening came, and the ball players sought their couches at a respectable hour and arose yesterday morning refreshed, reinvigorated and with clear heads. How far they had succeeded in winning the especial admiration of some of Philadelphia’s fair daughters may be determined from a slight circumstance. During Sunday night the rain had fallen pretty freely, and thus an excuse was afforded several of the Philadelphia darlings for raising their skirts, just to keep them from trailing on the wet sidewalk in front of the hotel at which the Cincinnati folks were staying, and to show just enough of pretty ankles, enclosed in red stockings, which, despite the intense heat of the day, the proprietors of the aforesaid pretty ankles had procured and donned to assure the visitors that they had influential “friends at court”... the fine-looking young men composing the Cincinnati nine had gained, beyond a doubt, the favor of the ladies.”