While Joplin no longer has a professional or semi-professional baseball team, perhaps its best known team was the Joplin Miners, where Mickey Mantle began his baseball career. Perhaps the city’s least known team may have also been its first. One of the first mentions of a team, and a brief one at that, appeared in 1880:
The Joplin Blue Stockings, perhaps one of Joplin's earliest baseball teams.
Source: Joplin Daily Herald
