Let me first apologize for such an uncharacteristically lengthy post. My initial intent was simply to write a little something about the importance of team uniforms. But I discovered some interesting and perhaps little known facts about the history of MLB uniforms, so I’ve included them here for your enjoyment.

The Indians have two jerseys – gold and black – and wear their pants both long and short, but all players wear the same “uniform” (style and color) in the same game.

The first official baseball game was played in 1846, but no team wore a team uniform until three years later. The first baseball uniforms were made of uncomfortably heavy fabrics such as wool and flannel, which may help explain why full length pants quickly gave way to baggy knicker-style pants. (Some say it was to reveal more “leg” so that women would be more enticed to come to games!)

Around 1900 all MLB teams were wearing team uniforms following a failed experiment where each player wore a different colored outfit based on his position, this in an attempt to help scorekeepers attribute errors to the correct players. Can you imagine how confusing that must have been?

Colored socks were part of the uniforms in the early days of baseball. Stirrups, which began to decline in 1990s when a few key players started wearing their pants down to their shoes, came into existence in the early 1900s after a player got blood poisoning from being cleated through his dyed sock. Dyes back then were not colorfast and it was believed that the dye seeped into the wound causing infection. So a white “sanitary” sock worn with a stirrup – a separate colored covering that had a cut out around the ankle (so that players could still fit into their cleats), was introduced. The opening of the cut out was intentionally small so that the sock still appeared to sport the team’s colors, stripes or logo.

In the 1920s, numbers were placed on the backs of jerseys. And as more games were televised, players’ names also appeared on jerseys, and home and away uniforms were issued.

So there you have it – a snapshot look at the evolution of baseball team uniforms! Although many things changed over the years, someone figured out early in the game’s history the value of team uniforms:

• They help visually distinguish competing teams and identify players.
• They foster team spirit, pride and unity.
• They create a sense of player equality.

And until the 1990s, players seemed to appreciate these values as evidenced by their universal compliance with the dictionary definition of the word “uniform”: “having always the same form, manner, or degree : not varying or variable.”

Sadly, today it’s become common to see “variation” in team uniforms (I think we call that an oxymoron) – particularly both long pants vs. knicker style pants being worn during the same game by players on the same team. This is allowed to happen despite the fact that the Official Baseball Rules state that:

• “All players on a team shall wear uniforms identical in color, trim and style.”
• and that “No player whose uniform does not conform to that of his teammates shall be permitted to participate in a game.”

Last time I checked, pants were part of the uniform, and “style” meant a manner of doing something, a distinctive appearance. So to me, wearing pants in a different manner violates both the letter of the law and the spirit of it.

Rules aside, many fans say that they don’t like the long pants – it looks sloppy. Others argue that pants worn at the knees help umpires see the strike zone more consistently, but there’s no hard evidence to support that. Interestingly though, umpires once fought against the long pants because THEY felt it made it harder to see the strike zone (which ends at the knees). And it’s also said that Leo Durocher told Willie Mays during a hitting slump to pull his pants up to his knees because he thought it was costing him strikes. Mays got two hits the day after he did as his manager asked  - so you be the judge.

I personally don’t have a strong opinion about long pants vs. short pants. I do have one about the uniformness of uniforms. Our coaches must too. They apparently appreciate the value of a team “uniform” and adhere to the dictionary meaning of the word as well as the official rules of the game. But they also appreciate that players may have varying preferences about how they like to wear their pants. To accommodate this “variable,” for some games our players collectively decide to wear long pants; for some games they decide to wear short pants – but they ALWAYS ALL wear their pants the same way in the same game. This does not vary. They look like a team. They play like a team. Maybe we’re on to something!

On April 6, Bob and I celebrated 44 years of marriage. We were just kids -19 and 20 years old; two high school sweethearts who met at a burger joint where we both worked. There was a snow squall the morning of our wedding day. Huge snowflakes that seemed to be the size of baseballs fell from the sky then quickly disappeared as they hit the ground. Some say that snow on a wedding day is considered good luck. Maybe. In retrospect, those baseball-sized snowflakes were probably more of a foreshadowing of what our life together would become. I should have known.

Before we got married, I knew Bob enjoyed baseball. He played in high school and on the Legion team. We talked about baseball sometimes – how as a little boy he wore clunky corrective shoes instead of sneakers to play ball because he had been born with a club foot; how he played 12U ball as a 7-year old; how he played ball every day, all summer long as a kid, stopping only for lunch and dinner. I should have known how deeply the baseball waters flowed within him.

On April 8, two days after we were married, we drove to Williamsburg VA to spend a few days. Our honeymoon was modest – even by 1974 standards. We checked into a nice but unpretentious motel with a lake view. We toured the Colonial city. We ate fast food. Whatever the day lacked in frills was more than made up for in the fun we were having simply spending our very first vacation day as a married couple.

If I had missed the telltale signs beforehand of the life I was destined to live as Bob’s wife, the first evening of our honeymoon should have been my wakeup call. Back in our motel room, in the romantic, blue glow of a TV screen, we watched Hank Aaron hit his 715th career home run, shattering Babe Ruth’s longstanding record. It was a memorable night!

Looking back, I can now see how much baseball has always been a big part of Bob’s life. I can’t say that I ever cared much about baseball all those years ago. But slowly and without notice it seeped into the available spaces of our life together until it became what it is today  - a part of “us.” Two had become one. I should have known.

photo courtesy of Chris Ahern

Team uniforms were distributed to the new crop of Indian players this week – another step in the natural progression from January’s player evaluations to April’s first game of the season. I’ve recently learned though that this is not necessarily an insignificant part of an ordinary process.

Arriving home with his black and gold Indians jersey in-hand, one newly minted player proclaimed, “Dad, I’m now officially a Mountville Indian. I can’t even describe how much this means to me.” Wow! More than “making the team,” the seemingly simple act of bestowing a team jersey to him was validation that his dream actually had now, finally, become a reality – a larger-than-life reality of which he was in total awe.

The weightiness of an Indians jersey placed in the eager hands of a wide-eyed, first time Indian player can belie the shirt’s physical size. Woven into the fabric, sewn into the seams can be the heft of some pretty big dreams of a kid who has always imagined what it would be like to wear an Indians uniform. That makes it a pretty big deal.

But where the dream ends, the hard work begins – the work of translating the dream into the experience. In baseball as in all of life, to preserve a dream’s worth, we need to give our very best in living it out, not just now-and-then, but every day – at every game, practice, at-bat, and during every play and inning in the field. We must be willing to “give the shirt off our back” – do whatever is asked, no matter the sacrifice; only then will we be able to look back on a dream and see that it actually became all we imagined it could be – and possibly more.

Hard to believe it’s been almost two years since I last wrote a blog post. No excuses – other than I felt I had run out of things to say. And before I knew it, days had turned into months and months into years.

There’s one thing that has been on my mind lately though. As I meet the parents of new Indians players each year, it seems that they keep getting younger and younger. Not so long ago, players’ parents were close to Bob’s and my ages, and their kids (the Indians players) were about the ages of our kids. But over time, the parents of the players have gradually become closer to our now grown children’s ages, and the Indians players are now the ages of our grandkids! All this seems to have happened overnight.

And while I’ve become increasingly aware that the parents seem to be getting younger, I’ve conveniently ignored the real reason this appears to be so – Bob and I have gotten older!

I easily can rationalize my unawareness of this thing that should be so painfully obvious. Because the age of an Indians player as well as his parents’ ages have remained relatively constant over the years, I never gave it a second thought that Bob and I had not stayed the same ages too! (Great concept. Faulty logic!) As days turned into months, months into years, in my mind we simply had remained blissfully frozen in a time warp, never having blown out even a single birthday candle!

Truth is, since Bob began coaching the Indians, we HAVE blown out lots of birthday candles – thirty-one years worth to be exact. In fact, “Happy Birthday” has been sung to us so many times that Bob now has coached against young men HE once coached; former players have kids playing baseball; and parents of former players cheer for grandkids up to bat.

Ever so slowly, days have turned into months, months into years. Years have slipped by almost without notice, leaving behind decades of memories frozen in time and Bob and I wondering “How the heck did the time go by so quickly?”