What would Ted Kluszewski think? Major League Baseball has unveiled—that seems to be the appropriate word—a uniform design that features pants so sheer they appear to reveal players’ underpants. (A New Yorker piece about the new duds was headlined “I See England, I See France.”) Connor McKnight, who hosts pre- and post-game shows on the Chicago White Sox Network, told NPR that player reaction is running “anywhere from incensed to really embarrassed.”
“When you’re on display for the nation and for your fans to watch,” McKnight said, “you don’t want to be quite as on display as a lot of players have been” during this Spring Training season.
Oh; Ted Kluszewski. He was a slugging first baseman in the 1950s, an All-Star for the Cincinnati Reds during the peak of his 15-year Big League career. No Givenchy, Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior; no designer of haute couture. But Kluszewski did make a bold baseball fashion statement by exposing more than was traditional on the ball field.
He bared his bulging biceps by cutting off the sleeves of his uniform top. In some quarters, the exhibition of his considerable muscles was reckoned to be an intimidation factor on opposing pitchers, though Kluszewski claimed that full sleeves merely constricted his ability to swing a bat. And he insisted he would not compromise his swing.
It is a fact that baseball players—all athletes, really—often correlate performance with attire, both physically and psychologically. A sort of dress-for-success conviction. In his best-selling 1974 book, “Ball Four,” pitcher Jim Bouton’s diary of the 1969 season, he wrote that former Yankee teammate Joe Pepitone “refused to take the field if his uniform isn’t skintight.” And another, Phil Linz, “used to say that he didn’t know why, but he could run faster in tight pants.”
Bouton quoted Dick Stuart, a contemporary, believing an even harder-to-substantiate claim that he could add 20 points to his batting average “if he knows he looks good.”
There was a 1994 Seinfeld episode purported to address more practical terms. In response to player complaints that the polyester uniforms then in style were too hot, George Costanza convinced Yankee manager Buck Showalter to dress the team in cotton—with the predictable gag result that the cotton outfits shrank and severely hampered player effectiveness.
In the real world of competitive attire, college football went through a period in the 1970s when tear-away jerseys were a thing, allowing ball-carriers to run through finger-tip tackling, leaving behind only a ripped piece of cloth. And that bit of dressing down led to the so-called crop-top jersey which exposed stomachs, made famous by Georgia’s Herschel Walker and Alabama’s Johnny Musso. But it hardly was a good look for some of the more corpulent linemen, and the style has long-since been banned by the NCAA.
But now we have another occasion, apparently, of sporting attire that allows too much to be seen. In his New Yorker report on baseball’s sartorial innovation, Zach Helfand noted that “sheer is hot. Sheer is in.” But while league officials contend that the new uniforms improve mobility by providing 24 percent more stretch (and thus more comfort), Helfand wrote that “some people were scandalized….a few players, caught bending over, or just sitting down, displayed silhouettes of genitals which were remarkable for their clarity and detail. One player reportedly resorted to buying his own pants at Dick’s Sporting Goods.”
The whole episode conjures some weird vision of baseball players, during their walk-up to the batter’s box, red-carpet-like, being queried, “Who are you wearing?” With the possible response, “Fruit of the Loom.”
There have been player grumbles, beyond the see-through situation, that the new clothes are chintzy; that, instead of pants being tailored to individual players, there merely are four cuts to choose from: Slim, standard, athletic (whatever that means) and muscular. Logos and lettering no longer appear to be stitched on; rather, are apparently cheap patches. Sports uniform maven Paul Lukas, on his uni-watch.com site, meanwhile spotted at least three teams whose road jerseys and pants were of different shades of gray. Not so dapper.
Designed and produced by two giants of the sports gear and memorabilia businesses (which will get no free advertisement here), the latest Big League get-ups nevertheless have not only failed to impress the wearers but also major-league designers. Transparency’s trendiness aside.
One, Isaac Mizrahi, told the New Yorker, “If you like bodies—and I like bodies—to some extent, you’re kind of excited when you first hear something like this. But this? This has a creep connotation. It’s none of our business.”