Masters of the Uni-verse

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
When it comes to sports, the uniforms matter a lot. Jerry Seinfeld famously said-

Jerry Seinfeld:
“… although team loyalty is a kind of hard thing to justify in the end. I love the Giants, but when you think about it, who are the Giants? You know what I mean, you know what I mean? It’s different guys. Every year it’s different guys, right? Teams will move from city to city.”

Roman Mars:
The players come and go, they get traded, they retire, they leave via free agency. But you keep rooting for those colors and that logo and that uniform.

Jerry Seinfeld:
“You’re rooting for clothes when you get right down to it. It’s the same outfits. I’m rooting for an outfit, that’s what it’s come down to. I want my team’s clothes to beat the clothes from the other city.

David Letterman:
“That’s not so bad either, there’s nothing really wrong with that.”

Jerry Seinfeld:
“It’s laundry. We’re rooting and screaming about laundry here.”

Roman Mars:
And the measure of this according to Paul Lucas, the creator of “Uni Watch,” a website devoted to the obsessive study of athletics aesthetics, is this.

Paul Lucas:
I’m a passionate New York Mets fan and I really, really hate the New York Yankees. But if the entire Mets team, 25 guys, is traded even up for the entire Yankee’s 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 Mets uniform, no matter who it is. Even if it’s a bunch of guys who were wearing the Yankees uniform the day before.

Roman Mars:
So the identities of the players are almost irrelevant. What we root for is the uniform.

Paul Lucas:
And that is an unusually strong form of brand loyalty. Because, if I like, say, a certain brand of cereal, let’s say “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, if it doesn’t taste good anymore or if some aspect of it…. If it doesn’t stay crunchy in 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 an unusually… to my mind, it’s a unique form of brand loyalty. There is nothing else like it, in our consumer landscape.

Roman Mars:
Like Paul Lucas, my friend Jesse Thorne also obsesses over baseball uniforms, although he didn’t make a career out of it. He has another job.

Jesse Thorne:
I’m Jesse Thorne. I’m the owner of maximumfun.org and host of the NPR show “Bullseye.”

Roman Mars:
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.

Paul Lucas:
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.

Roman Mars:
As opposed to curved kind of like– Is that what you mean?

Paul Lucas:
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 “The perfect curve to your brim”. And I remember as a little leaguer obsessing over getting the brim of my hat to curve exactly right, and I was not the only one.

Roman Mars:
We had Jesse Thorne talk with Paul Lucas of Uni Watch, and he discovered that Paul also zeroes in on the subtle expressions of individuality on a baseball player’s uniform.

Paul Lucas:
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 underbrim, or the undervisor – has changed. When I was a kid they were green, then they changed to grey for most teams, and now they are mostly black. And some players will write something on the underbrim. 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 grey, players could just use any old pen, and players would write unusual things there. Inspirational messages or 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, or the uni-verse as I like to call it.

[LAUGHTER]

Paul Lucas:
You like that, huh?

Jesse Thorne:
Is there continuity in the uni-verse?

Roman Mars:
But when you get two baseball uniform aficionados, 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.

Paul Lucas:
Basically, the whole area below the knee, and it’s the least legislated, least regulated and really least uniform part of the uniform.

Roman Mars:
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.

Paul Lucas:
And that has really changed in the last generation, and it’s changed particularly a lot over in 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-calf and then lower calf 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 footie pajamas. And then you have a handful of players, like say Alex Rodriguez and Curtis Granderson and Ichiro Suzuki, who like to hike their pants up high, so they’re a minority but there’s a faction of players who do that. But there is 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.

Roman Mars:
So let’s break it down.

Jesse Thorne:
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 tight or loose.

Roman Mars:
And you can wear your pants at a variety of different lengths.

Jesse Thorne:
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 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 sit there. You can wear your pants up all the way over your calves, at the top of your calves, like they were sporting pants from the early part of the 20th century, like they were breeks or plus 2’s or plus 4’s.

Roman Mars:
And if you wear your pants in that style, with the bottoms all the way up to your knees-

Jesse Thorne:
You can either wear solid colored socks, you can wear socks with a stripe up the side that’s meant to simulate a stirrup sock, or you can wear actual stirrup socks.

Roman Mars:
Of these choices, stirrup socks are the ultimate in baseball hosiery for the die-hard, old school fans. If you need help picturing a stirrup, they’re basically two layers of sock, there is 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 the sock, is just a strap that goes underneath the arch of the player’s foot.

Paul Lucas:
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 Ty Cobb, who would famously sharpen their spikes, so 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 dyes in those days were not colorfast, so if you got spiked, dye 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 – statue to the great unknown stirrups innovator – that if you wore an under sock, 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 under sock, 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 stir up opening, and that’s how baseball stirrups were born. And originally, that opening was tiny. It was just enough for you to get your foot to fit through, and almost immediately players begun pulling it and stretching it higher. And so more and more of an opening appeared and that exposed more and more of the sanitary under sock, which was usually white. So you started having this sort of interplay of color, of the ever-widening opening of the colored stir up and the white undersock. And by the 1960s there were players like Frank Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles, who were actually cutting the bottom part of the stirrup, the part that looped under your foot, and adding more fabric to it, so they could pull their stirrups even higher, higher than the manufacturer had intended.

Roman Mars:
While stirrups may have had this functional origin, they quickly lost that and they just became incorporated into the visual language of baseball.

Paul Lucas:
And I think for many people, myself included, it’s what we think of when we think of the 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.

Jesse Thorne:
I played in a kid’s baseball league and I remember how official-seeming and functional stirrups seemed to be, despite the fact that with contemporary sock technology they are rendered essentially functionless.

Roman Mars:
But it seems that the romance is gone by the time you get to the big leagues.

Jesse Thorne:
Yeah. And in fact 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.” If you leave your pants down to your shoe top, 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 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.

Roman Mars:
If there’s a villain in the story of baseball hosiery, that role would be filled by George Hendrick-

Paul Lucas:
Who played for the Cardinals and A’s and some other teams in the 70’s and 80’s. He’s now the first base coach of the Tampa Bay Rays.

Roman Mars:
He’s the one that’s most often credited, or blamed, as the most influential player in the move towards long pants.

Paul Lucas:
And he liked to wear his pants down toward his ankles, which by today’s standards it’s pretty tame, but by the standards of the year that 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 didn’t look dignified or whatever. But there were other players who thought it looked different, and therefore innovative and therefore cool.

Jesse Thorne:
What major league baseball player’s sock style do you most admire?

Paul Lucas:
At this point, it’s pretty slim pickings, in terms of hosiery heroes nowadays, because there aren’t many players who wear stirrups to begin with and even fewer who wear stirrups the way I liked 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’s style of stirrups that I love. A lot of other people don’t love it so much, but he’s number one as far as I’m concerned. Reed Johnson, who’s an outfielder, he wears stirrups in a not too shabby way. But the fact that I have to search my mental database to come up with 3 or 4 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. Steven Strosberg, 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, blousing. Jim Thome, who recently retired. Slugger, who played for many teams. Great, great blouser. All-time blouser. So there are lots of little elements here to appreciate.

Jesse Thorne:
There is absolutely no doubt that the final cut of this piece includes you saying “Jim Thome. former slugger for the Cleveland Indians. Great blouser. Excellent, excellent, all-time great blouser.”

[LAUGHTER]

Roman Mars:
Oh man. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jesse Thorne with Sam Greenspan, Avery Trufelman, Katie Mingle, and me, Roman Mars. Jessie Thorne is the host of the NPR program “Bullseye,” the best pop culture interview program around today, full stop. It is fantastic. If you want to learn about the good stuff in popular culture – TV, movies, books, music, video games – this is essential listening. Subscribe to “Bullseye” in iTunes or go to maximumfun.org. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arcsine, a group of architects who would never dishonor architecture’s hosiery heritage.

Support for 99% Invisible is provided by our listeners, all of whom are world-class blousers, and by Hover, the best way to buy and manage domain names. When I create this show, I had a meeting where I asked a panel of industrial designers and architects, landscape architects, graphic designers if there was a common process or phrase that captured the essence of their work and they said, “If design is done right, it was 99% invisible and I knew that was the name of the show instantly and I went home that night and I registered all kinds of variations on the domain. So if you have an idea, register your domain with Hover. They have easy to use tools, they don’t try to upsell you and they don’t make Superbowl ads that make you want to vomit. Get started at hover.com.

Support is also provided by TinyLetter, email for people with something to say. Paul Lucas has one more thing to say about his favorite baseball uniform of all time.

Paul Lucas:
God, I would love to play for the mid- to late-60s St. Louis Cardinals. I love Cardinals uniforms. I still love it today. I love the birds on the bat and that gorgeous embroidered insignia they have. In the late 60s, you had kind of a perfect storm, a perfect confluence of the right fabrics – they were lightweight flannels, they draped really well, they weren’t the super heavy wool flannels of the earlier eras so you didn’t totally roast in the summer. The prevailing style of where the pants were cuffed and how the stirrups were hiked up was just right. The Cardinals had these gorgeous striped stirrups. It would be really really hard for anyone to look bad in that uniform and man, I would be super proud to put that uniform on. That would be the best, just the best.

Roman Mars:
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