The Five Most Influential Uniforms of the Dougnuts Era

NUMBER 3: The Chicago White Sox (Road, 1964-68)

Among the more controversial fads of the Doughnuts era was the powder blue road uniform. The cerulean style didn’t achieve true respectability until the first all-powder blue (and AstroTurf) World Series in 1980 between the Kansas City Royals and eventual champion Philadelphia Phillies.   

Yet, powder blues have a history dating back as far as 1903, when the Cincinnati Reds experimented with an alternative to the then, as always, standard gray. The Chicago Cubs and Brooklyn Dodgers flirted with the look during the early ’40s, both at home and away with the Dodgers donning blue satin jerseys for night games in a gambit to reflect Ebbets Field’s recently installed lights.

After a twenty-year absence from the majors, the blue uni was revived by the Chicago White Sox in 1964. It was a sign of the times — particularly the increasing impact television was having on the game — as the Sox sought to take advantage of the recent advances in color broadcasts to boost the club’s brand. 

The Five Most Influential Uniforms of the Dougnuts Era

NUMBER 4: Willie Mays’s Wind Resistant Pants (1960)

It’s a baseball truism: legends of the twentieth century’s first half overshadow those of the second half. Often literally.

Picture Ty Cobb in silhouette; now, Rickey Henderson. 

Bob Feller … and Bob Gibson. 

Eddie Matthews … and Mike Schmidt. 

The shadow-show pattern that emerges is one of billowing power versus lean athleticism. This league-wide paring of forms began in 1960 at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. During the inaugural season of the notoriously blustery stadium, Willie Mays took his uniform pants in for an alteration to aide the speedy outfielder against wind resistance.

Mays returned to the field with a more form-fitting pant-leg — the first in the majors to taper from the knee to about three inches above the ankle. This look became the league standard by the early seventies, when a synthetic poly-cotton blend uniform replaced the baggy flannels that had dominated baseball style for nearly a century. 

Aesthetically, the new era’s small-ball strategies benefitted from the lithe elegance of this slimmer cut. Though Mays’s sartorial trendsetting also marked the first shot in the modern pant-leg’s war against the stirrup, a campaign that has by now all but been won by the hem.

The Five Most Influential Uniforms of the Dougnuts Era

NUMBER 5: The Philadelphia Phillies (1970-1990)

The racer stripe. Along with the mullet and Jack Clark’s batting stance, the racer stripe was a bane of baseball aesthetics in the 1980s. By 1988, when the Cincinnati Reds became the last to adopt the fat lines resembling over ambitious stirrups, more than a quarter of all major league clubs had experimented with them, though it took a while for the fad to build steam.

The Philadelphia Phillies were the first to don the racer. In 1970, the Phillies introduced their new look, complete with a Paul Rand-inspired logo and a relatively mild foretaste of the uniform craze to come. The next racer wouldn’t sprout until 1975, when the Houston Astros added racers to the pants of their Tequila Sunrise get-up. 

In a Platonic world, that would have been the end of it. But the racer’s peak remained over a decade away. The slow build-up laid waste to many formally robust major league brands — the Expos, the Mariners, even the Indians — until the New York Mets immortalized the ugliest stripes ever to appear this side of Charles Schultz’s imagination, in game six of the 1986 World Series.

mightyflynn:

(via Photoscream)

Two encounters with Bob Gibson.

First, Joe Posnanski’s, in his blog post-cum-essay published this week at SI.com:

More than one person has made a point about Bob Gibson’s voice: It is so measured, so welcoming, so proper; he sounds like a professor teaching class. The point is usually brought up in irony — the point being that the tenderness of Bob Gibson’s voice does not match the terrifying aura of the man.

Second, Roger Angell’s in “Distance”, his New Yorker profile from 1980:

It was ninety-seven degrees at the Omaha airport when I landed there early one evening in July, and when I called Bob Gibson from my motel room he invited me to come on out and cool off with a dip in his pool. He picked me up in his car — a black 1972 Mercedes SEL, lovingly kept up, with CB equipment (his call signal is Redbird) and terse “BG” license plates. Gibson looked well kept up himself, in tailored jeans, a white polo shirt, thin gold spectacles, a gold bracelet on his left wrist, a World Series ring, and a necklace with a pendant “45 in gold — his old uniform number. He is forty-four years old, but only his glasses spoiled the impression that he was perfectly capable of working nine tough innings the next afternoon. I asked him what he did for exercise these days, and he said, “Nothing.” I expressed surprise, and he said, “I played sports hard for thirty years, which is enough. Now I’m tired of all that.” No apology, no accompanying smile or joke: no small talk. He spoke pleasantly enough, though, in a light almost boyish voice, and when he did laugh — a little later, after we were more used to each other — the sound of it made me realize that only in the world of sports would he be considered anything but a young man.

The movie stills featured on this cover are taken from the 1970 World Series Highlight Film.  

(Via reds1-programs’ Photostream)

The view from 1962.

(via Photoscream’s Photostream.)

Due to some other (paying) writing commitments, I’m putting our countdown of the five most influential uniforms of the doughnuts era on hold ‘til next week, so I can give that weighty subject its due attention. 

In the meantime, here’s a shot of a jersey that didn’t make the list, but is probably my personal favorite uniform of all-time: the 1965-1970 Astros home uni.

As a double-bonus, the duds are modeled here under a sparkling new Astrodome roof, quite mysteriously, by Satchel Paige (one has to assume this was a PR ploy to show-off the former Colt .45s’ new brand, as Paige never so much as coached for the franchise).

(Via reds1-programs’ Photostream)

Next week I’ll be counting down the five most influential uniforms of the doughnuts era.

Not on the list? Despite their designer’s best effort, the high-concept unis worn by the Seattle Pilots in their only season, 1969, before they moved to the land of lactose to become the Brewers.

Bases Loaded (1988) for NES.

This was the baseball video game I inherited from my older brother. Looking back at it, I can see it stunted my understanding of baseball strategy, with a format suggesting the only important decisions on the field were the ones made on the mound and at homeplate. I would be well into my teens before I realized the richer truth.

The next (and, to date, last) baseball video game I played was EA Sports’ MVP Baseball 2005. Within the world of that plastic disc, my roommate’s copy, I built a 21st Century Cincinnati dynasty to rival the Big Red Machine, with Jimmy Rollins in Joe Morgan’s role and a specially designed pitcher as my phenom — my Don Gullett.

I named this personalized ace Shawn, after my older brother. In his rookie year, Shawn went 31-1 with an E.R.A. below one and led the Reds to our first of three straight championships. I celebrated this feat for half-a-minute before adding up the costs: three championships meant I’d played over 500 games of video baseball in under a year.

I promptly dropped the habit.

In their 1963 yearbook, the New York Mets ran this introduction to Mr. Met. Via Uni Watch:

Like a new baby “Mr. Met” must learn to crawl before he can walk and run. As this season progresses and in the years ahead, “Mr. Met” will appear in hundreds of different poses and will be an integral part of our new scoreboard at Shea Stadium. Their will be all types of “Mr. Met” merchandise, some of which will be available here at the ball park; many other items will be sold in department and variety stores.

Exactly like a new baby.

Major League Baseball’s marketing department breaks through the doors of perception.

From The 1969 World Series Highlight Film.

mightyflynn:

Wrigley Field, 1970

(Sun-Times archives)

Joe Morgan, demonstrating the iconic arm flap which he used to time his swing, guests on Feelings, a short-lived syndicated variety show produced out of Cincinnati in the mid-’70s. The show was hosted by gospel singer Gwen Conley.

The chicken wing method was suggested to Little Joe by Nellie Fox, a fellow Hall of Fame 5’6” second baseman and rookie-year teammate, who also happened to be Morgan’s childhood hero.

mightyflynn:

Royals Stadium, 1973

It’s nice to know Bud $elig is a man of his word. Maybe if we sent him $250M he’d resolve that broadcasting blackout issue he’s been looking into for four years.

(via Photoscream)

Not wishing to tramp all over Flynn’s diplomatic tone, but I have to say it: Selig is a completely unlovable villain. During his almost two-decade tenure, he’s gradually assumed the position previously occupied in baseball by a tag-team of George Steinbrenner and the ghost of Harry Frazee.

Despite that and the fact I’ve never attended a game there, Royals/Kauffman Stadium always seemed an underrated ballpark to me. I’m looking forward to it benefiting from the mid-summer spotlight. Cos we can pretty well assume it will be awhile before it sees any autumn action.

Royals Stadium is a true anamoly, I have trouble thinking of another park to compare it with. When it opened in 1973, it was essentially a Doughnuts era stab at a baseball-only retro park. Only, in this case, it was retro-futurist. Looking at its egg-shaped structure, I get the sense this was H.G. Wells’s vision of what baseball would look like in some far off 1970s. 

Well, the seventies finally arrived and the only place where baseball looked like that was in Kansas City.