Now Playing Second Base: Dr. Denton?

Someone near and dear to me asked why today's big league baseball players wore their pant legs down around their ankles. My reply (ineffectually) was that uniform styles change over time. In basketball, thanks to the Fab 5 (freshmen) who—decades ago—took the University of Michigan to the NCAA Men's Championship Game, the style of long, baggy shorts became the style for collegiate (and ultimately professional) basketball uniforms. In football, the influence of Paul Brown's Cincinnati Bengals and their non-linear uniform decoration have taken football uniforms into a swirl of streaks and colors. Nothing remains unchanged over time and major league baseball is no exception. Today's major leaguers look as if they wore they jammies to the ballpark. If this is (fair & balanced) trivia, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Field of Slobs
By Paul Lukas

Major League Baseball’s (2006) All-Star Game, which will take place tonight in Pittsburgh, has always featured an endearing crazy quilt of colors and insignias, because the players wear their respective team uniforms instead of a generic outfit for each squad as in football and basketball.

Unfortunately, the quilt has been a bit less crazy in recent years than in decades past, because most of today’s players wear their pant legs all the way down to their shoe tops. Of this year’s 64 All-Stars, only five — Ichiro Suzuki, Barry Zito, Jim Thome, Alfonso Soriano and Brad Penny — routinely hike up their pants to expose a once-crucial element of the baseball uniform: the colored sock.

If you think baseball hosiery isn’t important, think again. Back in the early days, when uniform pants were essentially knickers, stockings were the primary way for a team to show its colors. Note that we don’t have teams called the Blue Caps or the White Pants — we have the White Sox and the Red Sox. And during the McCarthy era, when the Cincinnati Reds were concerned that their team name might be associated with Communism, the team’s owners officially changed the club’s name to the Redlegs — a name that wouldn’t work today because not a single Red exposes his hose.

Socks have also played a key role in baseball players’ expressions of sartorial style. If you played Little League, you probably remember the special feeling you had as you adjusted your stirrup socks, perhaps in exactly the same style as your favorite player. Indeed, the particular ratio of colored stirrup to white undersock was the standard visual calling card for generations of ballplayers. In his classic memoir “Ball Four,” Jim Bouton reported that many players sliced the bottoms of their stirrups and had extra fabric sewn in, so the pants could be stretched ever higher. That way, wrote Bouton, “your legs look long and cool instead of dumpy and hot.”

Nothing is dumpier than today’s baggy, full-length pants, which look like footie pajamas. While there are still a few high-pants holdouts, they’ve become increasingly rare, in part because of peer pressure. Mets third baseman David Wright wrote in his blog in May that the team’s veteran players gave him “a hard time” when he experimented with high pants for one game.

“I guess the general feeling is that the pants-up look is a high school or college type of style,” he wrote. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s a high value on looking and acting like a professional in this clubhouse.”

The most interesting thing about Wright’s comment is that sock exposure is now seen as a youthful trend, when in fact it’s as old school as baseball gets. But sure enough, anyone watching last month’s College World Series saw a much higher proportion of players wearing their pants hiked up than in the Major Leagues. This could bode well for the next generation of big-leaguers — and for all of us who have to look at them — assuming “professionals” like Wright don’t talk them out of it.

But don’t blame the players. The real fault lies with Major League Baseball’s higher-ups, who are legendarily persnickety about everything from sleeve lengths (must be standardized within a given team) to handwritten cap inscriptions (forbidden under any circumstances) but have allowed pant cuffs to migrate southward with nary a peep, with disastrous results for the game’s hosiery heritage.

So what can be done? Plenty. Little League coaches can teach their players how to cuff their pants up high. Weekend softball players can do it themselves. And fans could reward players who know the proper way to wear a uniform when next year’s All-Star Game voting rolls around.

And don’t give up — history has a tendency to reward the faithful. After all, the last two World Series champions were the Red Sox and the White Sox.

Paul Lukas writes the “Uni Watch” column for ESPN.com and edits the blog Uniwatch.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company

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