Sports Metric of the Week: Oldest Current MLB Team Names in Continuous Use

The Mets and Cubs played Wednesday, making that the last meeting between the two clubs in the 2016 regular season. During the game both teams came out sporting retro jerseys, specifically their 1980’s variants. The one that the Mets were donning was the one they had on during the 1986 World Series, which they eventually went on to win through 7 games in quite historic fashion.

In keeping with this historical sentiment, our “Sports Metric of the Week” takes a look at MLB franchise history, specifically what clubs have been around the longest under the same team name.

The oldest current team under the same name dates back all the way to 1890 with the Philadelphia Phillies. While not the most creative or inventive name, it is indeed the oldest.

Second oldest, as well as the final still currently active team created in the 19th century, we have the Pittsburgh Pirates. Originally the Pirates had a team color scheme of red, white, and blue, but moved over to black and gold to better match their city flag.

A team that came close to making this list was the Cincinnati Reds, if it wasn’t for a change of name to the Redlegs throughout the 1954-1958 seasons the two teams would have been tied for first seeing that the Reds were also founded in 1890. This change for those brief 4 years was in fear of the original name having a link or association to communism, but was later changed back after the “Red Scare”.
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