99% Invisible - 111- Masters of the Uni-verse

Episode Date: April 23, 2014

Uniforms matter. When it comes to sports, they might be the only thing to which we’re actually loyal. Sports uniforms are packaging. But unlike any other packaging, if the product inside changes or degrades, we remain loyal. Players come and … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When it comes to sports, the uniforms matter a lot. Jerry Seinfeld famously said. Although team loyalty is a kind of hard thing to justify in the end. You know, I love the Giants, but when you think about it, who are the Giants? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? I mean, it's just, it's different guys. Every year it's who are the giants? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? I mean, it's just, it's different guys. Every year it's different guys, right? Teams will move from city to city. The players come and go, they get traded, they retire, they leave via free

agency, but you keep rooting for those colors in that logo and that uniform. You're rooting for clothes when you get right down to it. It's the same outfit. It's the same I'm rooting for an outfit. That's where it's come down to. I want Mike's team's clothes to be the clothes for me in the city. That's not so bad either. There's nothing really wrong with that. It's laundry. We're rooting for swimming about laundry here.

And the measure of this, according to Paul Lucas, the creator of Beauty Watch, a website devoted to the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics is this. I'm a passionate New York Metz fan and I really, really hate the New York Yankees, but if the entire Metz team, 25 guys, is traded even up for the entire Yankees team, 25 guys, today, who do I root for tomorrow? And to me, the answer is obvious. It's a no-brainer. I root for whoever is wearing the Metz uniform, no matter who it is, even if it's a bunch

of guys who are wearing the Yankees uniform the day before. So the identities of the players are almost irrelevant. What we root for is the uniform. And that is an unusually strong form of brand loyalty, because if I like say a certain brand of cereal, let's say I like Cheerios, well I identify with the box and the logo and the colors and all that the package design but I also presumably like the product and if I find that the quality of the product has changed you know if it doesn't taste good anymore

or if some aspect of it if it doesn't stay crunchy and milk or whatever I may give it one or two more tries based on my brand loyalty, but eventually I will leave that brand. I will abandon it if I find that the quality is no longer there. But in sports, the content of the product and the quality of that content, meaning the players, is changing all the time. You can be really good one year, really bad.

The next year your roster can turn over. So the content of the product is constantly in flux, but we stay loyal to whoever is wearing that uniform. And that is, and usually, to my mind, it's a unique form of brand loyalty. There's nothing else like it in our consumer landscape. Like Paul Lucas, my friend Jesse Thorn also obsesses over baseball uniforms, although he didn't make a career of it. He has another job. I'm Jesse Thorn. I'm the owner of MaximumFun.org

and the host of the NPR show, Bullseye. There are certain things about a uniform that serve a purpose by being uniform. They help the players identify each other. They help us rally behind our team, they give us something cool to buy, but there are certain things on a uniform that aren't uniform. Things that a player can choose. And the number of things that a player can choose are very, very small.

I mean, it was a big controversy when I was a kid, when Ken Griffey Jr. shagged balls in the outfield during batting practice with his baseball hat on backwards. It's a big controversy now when a baseball player wears his cap brim totally flat in what you might call the hip hop style as opposed to curved kind of like, is that what you mean? Yeah, well, I mean, they literally make a device that you can buy at the sporting good store or order via mail order that will give you quote unquote the perfect curve to your brim and I mean I remember as a little

eager obsessing over getting the brim of my hat to curve exactly right and I was not the only one. We had Jesse Thorn talk with Paul Lucas of UniWatch and he discovered that Paul also zeros in on the subtle expressions of individuality on a baseball player's uniform. I'm always very alert for any glimpse of the underside of a player's cap brim, because over the years, the color of that element, it's called the under brim or the under visor, has changed. When I was a kid, they were green, then they changed to gray for most teams, and now they are

mostly black, and some players will write something on the under-brim. Fewer players do it now, now that they're black, because you have to use like a white or a silver sharpie. Back when they were gray, players could just use any old pen, and players would write unusual things there. Inspirational messages with the names of their children or whatever the case might be. And that always, to me, was an interesting, sort of, stealth area of the uniform world, with a universe, as I like to call it. The other thing I'm kind of... You like that?

Because they're continuity in the universe. But when you get to baseball uniform, I fish in atos like Paul and Jesse together in conversation. There is one area of the baseball uniform that they truly geek out about, the intersection between the pant leg and the sock. Basically, the whole area below the knee, and it's the least legislated, least regulated, and really least uniform part of the uniform.

Even though baseball teams have been historically named after the color of their socks, there is no rule governing the length of the uniform. Even though baseball teams have been historically named after the color of their socks, there is no rule governing the length of the pants. Or whether or not you will actually see those socks. And that has really changed in the last generation. And it's changed a particularly a lot over, you know, the last century or so. Early baseball uniforms had essentially knickers.

And what do you wear with knickers? You wear stockings. And that's what early baseball uniforms were. And over the course of the 20th century, those knickers started getting longer and longer. And they started drooping a little lower and a little lower. And they went to mid-caf and then lower-caf and then a little lower. And now we have so many of the players who wear their pants all the way down to their shoe tops like footy pajamas. And then you have a handful of players like, say, Alex Rodriguez and Curtis Granderson and

Etro Suzuki who like to hike their pants up high. So there are a minority, but there is a faction of players who do that, but there's no uniformity to it. And I think it's a shame or even a tragedy that we've got these players who wear the pants all the way down to the shoe tops because when you cover up the socks, you're basically dishonoring baseball's hosiery heritage. So let's break it down. Today baseball pants are stretchy polyester.

They used to be wool flannel. So the pants that they have now, you can wear them kind of tighter loose and you can wear your pants at a variety of different lengths. So they can go down all the way to the top of your shoes and in fact some players have gone so far as to have a strap that goes underneath their shoes to keep it from showing any sock at all. You can wear your pants up sort of at the bottom of your calves, which shows a little bit of sock. That's probably what most players do, and they just kind of let them set there. You can wear your pants up all the way over your calves at the top of your calves, like they were, you know, sporting pants from the early part of the 20th century, you know, like they were bricks or plus tubes or plus floors. And if you wear your pants in that style

with the bottoms all the way up to your knees, you can either wear solid colored socks, you can wear socks with a stripe up the side that's meant to simulate a stir-up sock, or you can wear actual stir-up socks. Of these choices, stir-up socks are the ultimate in baseball, hosary for the diehard old school fans. If you need help picturing a stirrup,

they're basically two layers of sock. There's a bottom layer that's a normal old sock, but there's also an exterior sock that's a different color. But the bottom of that sock is just a strap that goes underneath the arch of the player's foot. The idea behind stirrups goes back about a century. Baseball pants used to be just knickers and you would wear stockings with them.

But in the early days of baseball, baseball was a pretty rough and tumble game. Players would often get spiked and there were some players like the Great Hall of Famer Thai Cobb who would famously sharpen their spikes so that when they slid into second or third base, they would try to cut up the infielder. And if you got spiked in the shin,

you'd get cut in your stockings and the fabric dies in those days. We're not color fast. And so if you got spiked, die from your stockings could get in the wound and you could get blood poisoning, or so was the thinking. I don't know if there are any documented cases of players who actually got blood poisoning. And so someone got the idea and we don't know who, some great hero who deserves a statue, you know, the statue to the great unknown stirrups innovator, that if you wore an undersock, an extra layer of sock, you would have an extra layer of protection, a sanitary layer of protection. And so this undersock became known as a sanitary, or a pair of such socks became known as sanitaries or sannies.

And then the overstocking, well, they didn't want you to have to wear the stocking over the undersock because now you'd be wearing two pairs of socks and your shoes wouldn't fit anymore. And so they decided to cut out the foot area of the overstocking and create this little stirrup opening. And that's how baseball stirrups were born. And originally, that opening was tiny. It was just enough for your foot to fit through.

And almost immediately, players began pulling it and stretching it higher. And so more and more of an opening appeared and that exposed more and more of the sanitary undersauk, which was usually white. So you started having this sort of interplay of color of the ever widening opening of the colored stirrup and the white undersauk and by the 1960s there were players like Frank Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles who were actually cutting the bottom part of the stir-up,

the part that looped under your foot, and adding more fabric to it. So that they could pull their stir-ups even higher, higher than the manufacturer had intended. While stir-ups may have had this functional origin, they quickly lost that, and they just became incorporated into the visual language of baseball.

And I think for many people, myself included, it's what we think of when we think of a baseball player. It's interesting to note that in the pages of the New Yorker, the Weekly magazine, they run a lot of cartoons that are baseball themed, and their cartoonists almost invariably depict baseball players wearing stirrups, even though most actual baseball players today do not wear stirrups. I played in a kid's baseball league, and I remember how official seeming and functional stirrups seem to be, despite the fact that, you know, with contemporary sock technology, they are rendered essentially functionalists. But it seems that the romance is gone by the time you get to the big leagues.

Yeah. And in fact, there, you know, I've asked players, why do you wear your pants down? And the answer I often get is, it's just so much less work. You know, if you leave your pants down to your shoe tops, you don't, it's lower maintenance, essentially. You don't have to worry about your socks staying up. You don't have to worry that your stirrups are both sort of at the exact same height or level. You don't have to keep looking and checking to make sure that they're just so.

Just like most of us don't when we walk around with, you know, slacks or jeans or whatever with regular pants. If you wear your pants low, you don't really have to worry about what's going on underneath them. And so it's just easier, and I understand that. If there's a villain in the story of baseball, Hozary, that role would be filled by George Hendrick, who played for the Cardinals and A's and some other teams in the 70s and 80s.

He's now the first base coach of the Tampa Bay race. He's the one that's most often credited or blamed as the most influential player in the move towards long pants. And he liked to wear his pants down toward his ankles, which by today's standards is pretty tame, but by the standards of the era he played in was seen as radical. He showed very, very little of his socks or stirrups, and some people thought it looked weird or it looked dumpy or it didn't look dignified or whatever, but there were other players who thought it looked different and therefore innovative and therefore cool. What major league baseball players, a sock style, do you most admire?

At this point, I mean, it's pretty slim pickings in terms of Hojiri heroes nowadays because there aren't many players who wear stirrups to begin with and even fewer who wear stirrups the way I like to see them, like the style I like. The best, I would say, is a pitcher named Josh Outman, which is a great name for baseball, right? Outman, he's a pitcher, he gets the players out. And he wears a real 1970 style of stirrups that I love. A lot of other people don't love it so much, he's number one as far as I'm concerned read Johnson who's an outfielder He wears stirrups in a not too shabby way, but the fact that I I have to search my

Mental database to come up with three or four players. It's just not that great in terms of stirrups now there are other players who do Hike their pants up high and just wear solid color socks and do so pretty nicely. Curtis Granderson, man, he looks great in the uniform. Stephen Strasberg of the Washington Nationals, the young phenom pitcher, does something great called blousing, which means he doesn't just hike his pants up, but he tucks under the cuff in a way where it just sort of blouses out a little bit at the point where he tucks it under instead of just bunching them up the way Alex Rodriguez does, for example.

And that's sort of a lost art blouse in. Jim Tome, who recently retired, slugger, who played for many teams, great, great blouse sir, all-time blouse sir. So there are lots of little elements here to appreciate. There is absolutely no doubt that the final cut of this piece includes you saying Jim Tome, former slugger for the Cleveland Indians. Great blouse sir, excellent, excellent, all-time great blouse sir. Oh man. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jesse Thorn with Sam Greenspan, Avery Truffleman,

Katie Mingle, and me Roman Mars. Jesse Thorn is the host of the NPR program Bullseye, the best pop culture interview program around today. Bull stop. and Mars. iTunes or go to MaximumFun.org. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KALW in San Francisco and produced of the offices of ArcSign, a group of architects who would never dishonor architectures Hozary Heritage. We have more stories about design all the time on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but we keep our pants rolled to our knees in our stir-up straight at 99bi.org. Radio Tepio from PRX.