The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  Mercifully, the Expos, suspecting it was the flannel, had ordered a single sample that spring of a new double-knit polyester uniform, and they had Singleton wear that in the clubhouse during one game. But only the shirt. The pants didn’t fit. He spent four blissful hours, hive-free, but still had to petition the league to wear it in a game, as a team’s uniforms were required to be just that: uniform.

  The mystery was solved and Singleton—allowed to dress in double-knits—hit .274 in 142 games that season. As Expos general manager Jim Fanning said, “The knits are more comfortable, harder to tear, easier to clean and cost almost half as much.” Singleton was freed from the tyranny (but also the beauty) of flannel. And soon, so was all of baseball.

  Moose Skowron, who retired in 1967 and never knew the joy of double-knits, said, “These lightweight uniforms are like pajamas compared to what we had.”

  Like women’s shoes, or the bearskin hats worn by Buckingham Palace guards, those flannel uniforms were at once ridiculously uncomfortable and—lest we forget—profoundly beautiful. What was on them was often more appealing than what was in them.

  In February 1921, Cardinals manager Branch Rickey was scheduled to speak at a lunch at the First Presbyterian Church in Ferguson, Missouri. The young lady in charge of table decorations, Allie May Schmidt, saw two birds alight on a sprig outside her window. Inspired, she cut out a series of paper redbirds and strung them together with yarn. The vivid birds captivated Rickey, and the following season, for the first time, across every Cardinal’s chest sat a pair of redbirds, perched on a bat.

  That birds-on-a-bat logo would become one of the sport’s most evocative icons, for years embroidered on St. Louis uniform tops by a woman named Eulah Street, maestro of a technique called chain stitching, an ancient art that produces the beautifully curved lines of the script “Cardinals.”

  Angled script is quintessentially baseball, and was first worn in the professional ranks, according to the Hall of Fame, in 1902, by both Oakland and San Francisco of the California League. Its most famous manifestation was the scripted “Dodgers” that first appeared in Brooklyn in 1938, that rich blue against the crisp white, as if God had signed it there with a Sharpie. In 1952, the team added red numbers on the left rib cage. Against that blinding white, the red popped like lipstick on a starched collar.

  In 1910, the Spalding company offered six different styles of lettering on its baseball uniforms, among them the “Block,” the “Fancy,” and the “Old English.” They sound a bit like offerings at a turn-of-the-century brothel, but in fact had become baseball’s typefaces. From this limited font menu, the Detroit Tigers in 1904 went with Old English, whose Gothic capital D became, over the next century, a proud symbol of a beleaguered city, tattooed on the right forearms of Detroit natives Eminem and Kid Rock, so that it became a kind of global export, a worthy rival in baseball’s alphabet to the interlocking NY of the Yankees.

  These were not accidental fashions. Teams devoted great effort to trendsetting, often without success. In 1916, the Giants wore uniforms of purple plaid. The black-and-white photography of the time has given those uniforms historical cover, but they were hideous to behold, and were abandoned after one season. That same summer, across town, the Brooklyn Robins wore blue checks. But as ever, baseball and windowpanes didn’t mix well.

  Also in 1916, for the first time, a big-league baseball team wore numbers on their uniforms, a practice the Indians abandoned after one season. At the National League’s annual meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1923, Dodgers president Charles Ebbets suggested the league adopt numbers, either on both sleeves or the peak of the cap, the latter evidently as an aid to migrating birds. Ebbets had begun his life in baseball selling scorecards, but a scorecard bereft of uniform numbers.

  In the end, only the Cardinals chose to wear numbers in ’23—on the left sleeve—and even then only briefly. In his online exhibit on uniform evolution, “Dressed to the Nines,” Hall of Fame curator Tom Shieber quotes Branch Rickey lamenting the results thirty-nine years later. “Ridicule followed throughout the country, presswise and otherwise,” Rickey said. “More particularly, the players were subjected to field criticism from the stand and especially from opposing players.… The effect upon the team was bad and ‘busted up’ the team morale or spirit completely. They really didn’t want to show themselves on the field. Because of the continuing embarrassment to the players, the numbers were removed.”

  Uniform numbers wouldn’t take hold until 1929. The summer before in England, Arsenal and Sheffield Wednesday wore numbered shirts for the first time in association football, on August 25, 1928. Each number corresponded to the player’s position, beginning with the respective goalkeepers, who wore number 1.

  The following spring, the Indians and Yankees opened the season doing something similar, except their numbers corresponded to the batting order, famously accounting for Babe Ruth’s number 3 and Lou Gehrig’s number 4.

  In a game beholden to superstition, numbers quickly took on magical, sometimes diabolical, properties. In April 1951, Ralph Branca was photographed on Friday the thirteenth displaying the number 13 on the back of his Dodgers jersey. On his left shoulder was a black cat. It was a rare kind of provocation for baseball, and after Bobby Thomson homered off Branca that October, robbing the Dodgers of the pennant and bringing lifelong fame to both men, Branca briefly switched to number 12.

  Branca’s future son-in-law, Bobby Valentine, born May 13, 1950, wore the number 13 until he was ravaged by injuries, then he too switched numbers. Carlos May became the only big leaguer to wear his birthday on his back: MAY 17. When he owned the Braves, Ted Turner gave pitcher Andy Messersmith the number 17 but with CHANNEL instead of MESSERSMITH above it, because Turner owned Channel 17 in Atlanta. Playing for Fargo-Moorhead in the Northern League in 1951, Johnny Neves wore a backward 7 (read NEVES backward), two decades before Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee would request the number 337 (look at the number upside down).

  It was White Sox owner Bill Veeck who first put player names on the back of big-league uniforms, in 1960, black letters four inches high sewn onto their road uniforms only. “The fans in Chicago are thoroughly familiar with their players,” Sox PR man Ed Short told reporters. As ever, players did not entirely embrace the innovation. “We look like semi-pros,” Nellie Fox complained in spring training. Another thought it an invasion of privacy, and asked why the team didn’t just print their home phone numbers on the uniforms.

  But fans and writers were immediately won over by a small revolution that only cost, as Veeck boasted, $200. Of course, he got what he paid for. The letters were poorly spaced—Nellie Fox’s three-letter surname managed to take up most of his back—and the names sometimes randomly spelled. When the team played in New York in May, slugger Ted Kluszewski strode to the plate with KLUSEWSXI on his back. The Z had been sewn on backward. Even so, Big Klu expressed gratitude for his broad back, so that his name—however badly butchered—had ample room for display, and didn’t exile the K and the I to either armpit.

  Ted Kluszewski’s name misspelled on the back of his White Sox jersey, 1960. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Klu’s armpits were frequently exposed by the sleeveless uniforms he’d worn in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Before double-knits, the flannel vest was about the only way to avoid heatstroke. Another was Orlon. In 1941, DuPont created this acrylic polymer, which was an improvement over nylon in that it decomposed, rather than melted. But Orlon didn’t find a market until the middle 1950s, when it became an essential component in the tight women’s sweaters of the era. By 1960, the material was everywhere. “Orlon,” as DuPont noted in its own history of the wonder substance, “had become a 19-year-old overnight sensation.”

  Lightweight, space-age, comfortable, Orlon was married with wool and introduced into baseball uniforms that decade. The blend became—in the words of uniform historian Marc Okkonen—“the ‘ultimate’ material for baseball flannels” at the time. Those flannel uniforms were lighter than my
grandfather’s, and also tighter, the pants tapering, a watershed often credited to Willie Mays, whose tailored pants more closely reflected the civilian style of the day.

  Of course, tapered pants weren’t Mays’s only sartorial affectation: He remains more famous for his too-small cap, which flew off his head like a champagne cork when he sprinted after fly balls.

  Casey Stengel of the Pirates walked to the plate at Ebbets Field on a Sunday afternoon in 1919 expecting to be booed. It was the first year Sunday baseball was allowed in New York, and Dodgers fans enjoyed the novelty—the illicit pleasure—of booing Stengel loudly on the Lord’s day. Stengel acknowledged the boos by doffing his cap, at which time—and to great cheers—a sparrow flew out.

  A year later, at the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, Stengel trapped another sparrow beneath his cap on the outfield grass, donned his cap with the bird underneath, and promptly caught a fly ball. He then doffed his cap, loosing the bird on delighted spectators.

  Hats have been donned (a contraction of “do on”) and doffed (“do off”) since at least the 1500s, when milliners—literally, merchants from Milan—were becoming renowned for their women’s hats. Doffing one’s hat is an unwitting homage to military history. Medieval knights raised the visors of their helmets to reveal their faces and, by extension, their peaceful intentions. From this gesture we get the modern military salute, which reveals a right hand free of weaponry, but also serves as a token doffing of a hat when real hat-doffing is impossible or impractical. Removing one’s hat in the presence of a lady—or to a cheering crowd at a baseball park—is part of this code of chivalry, though the fact is likely now lost on the modern player making a curtain call.

  There was much history, then, bound up in hats by the time Stengel doffed his in 1920, in the middle of a golden age of headwear, when no respectable scalp went uncovered. That year, German-born Ehrhardt Koch borrowed $5,000 from an aunt and opened the E. Koch Cap Company at the corner of Genesee and Bailey Streets in Buffalo, where he began to make “newsboy” caps—eight-paneled wool flat caps of the sort worn by kids shouting, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” while waving newspapers full of ads for felt trilbies and straw boaters.

  That first year, Koch made five thousand dozen caps for men, and in 1922, reflecting this heady age of hat-wearing, he changed the name of his burgeoning operation to the New Era Cap Company.

  There was little market then for baseball caps, which were worn only by baseball players, who were profoundly grateful to have them. On a diamond, baseball caps provided marginal shade (an 1895 cap with a transparent green bill, like a poker player’s eyeshade, never caught on) and protection from the rain. But beneath the bill, or on the crown, a spitballer could store all manner of foreign substances, or simply use it as his briefcase. In the deciding game of the 1925 World Series, Washington pitcher Walter Johnson asked the home plate umpire for sawdust to scatter around the wet pitcher’s mound. When the ump obliged, Johnson filled his cap with it, and carried it back to his position like a busker begging for change.

  So the cap had all manner of uses. It was awning, birdcage, and wheelbarrow. It was also a potent symbol, doffed and held over the heart during the national anthem. It was a thing of beauty, too: adorned with Detroit’s Gothic D, or the linked St and L of the Cardinals, or the big S that coiled around the smaller O and X on the White Sox cap, like a snake protecting its eggs.

  Baseball caps represented a growing alphabet of American iconography. They were integral to baseball’s many superstitions. Giants coach Clarence Mitchell “wore his cap inside out at the Polo Grounds on Sunday, hoping it would bring victory”—an early citation, in the New York Times in 1932, of what would come to be known as the rally cap.

  That year, Ehrhardt Koch was persuaded by his American-born son Harold to design a baseball cap. There were echoes here of American-born Bud Hillerich persuading his German immigrant father, Johann Frederich, to manufacture baseball bats half a century earlier. Within two years, New Era had struck a deal to supply the caps of the nearest major-league team, the Cleveland Indians, and was making caps for minor-league and amateur teams, while also making private-label caps for Wilson and Spalding, who would sew on logos and sell them on to teams.

  By the 1950s—when New Era was directly supplying the Indians, Tigers, Dodgers, and Reds, and indirectly supplying other teams through Spalding and Wilson—the public was becoming covetous of these game-worn caps. Some teams offered replica caps for a dollar, in any of three sizes: Boys’ Small, Boys’ Medium, or Boys’ Large. But what of the grown man who wanted one? After Phillies pitcher Curt Simmons beat the Giants at the Polo Grounds on September 23, 1956, a fan ran onto the field and stole his hat. Simmons ran after him, intent on retrieving the cap, quite possibly with the head still in it. In 1957, after the final out of the World Series, Braves pitcher Lew Burdette chased down the man who stole his cap and wrestled it from his grasp.

  What was the appeal of a sweat-stained cap that offered little more than eye shade? That’s what Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev wondered while cooling his heels in an Indonesian rest house after delivering an anti-American speech in Indonesia in 1960. Khrushchev, aboil after touring the Buddhist temple of Borobodur, beckoned American journalist Roy Essoyan to sit next to him, in a seat just vacated by President Sukarno of Indonesia. Essoyan, the former Kremlin correspondent for the Associated Press, by now stationed in Southeast Asia, obliged, and doffed his baseball cap as he sat down. Khrushchev snatched the cap from his hands, “examined it”—in Essoyan’s words—“and waved it around.”

  “This is the sort of thing that baffles me about the United States,” Khrushchev said. “America is such a rich country and you Americans wear rags like this.”

  “That’s no rag,” Essoyan replied, standing up for his country. “It may not be very beautiful, but it’s very handy at baseball games.”

  Khrushchev was photographed putting the cap on his head, providing a momentary thaw in the Cold War. “It must keep the sun off very well,” he said, fascinated and perhaps even envious. “It looks very utilitarian.”

  And it was. Baseball players may have dressed like farmers a century earlier, but farmers were now dressing like baseball players, having ditched straw hats for baseball caps emblazoned with the names of feed companies. Caps were colonizing the rest of the world, and even places beyond. New Era supplied baseball caps to members of the USS Hornet’s Splashdown Recovery team when they fished the Apollo 11 astronauts out of the Pacific Ocean. A few years earlier the astronauts themselves had begun wearing baseball caps adorned with the gold-braided “scrambled eggs” of navy officers, an embellishment that was offensive to at least one columnist.

  The scrollwork “is pretentious and insensitive, and it is ruinous to the most democratic, functional and even lovable piece of headwear in our contemporary folklore,” wrote the syndicated columnist Charles McDowell, who likened braids on a ball cap to rhinestone buttons on blue jeans or white sidewalls on a jeep. “The plain old baseball cap is something that matters in this country. Admiral Halsey wore one, plain, on the bridge of his flagship in World War II. Service station attendants wear them. General Westmoreland wears one in Viet Nam. Football coaches and golfers and truck drivers wear them. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower have worn them. Farmers are abandoning straw hats to wear baseball caps on their tractors. Movie directors wear them. A miler from Kenya wears one to run in. Y. A. Tittle wore one to keep the sun off his bald spot at football practice.” And so on.

  Baseball players, it was easy to forget, also wore them. By 1974, New Era was outfitting twenty of the twenty-four major-league teams. Truckers could buy foam-crowned, mesh-backed hats equipped with plastic “snapbacks” that turned any cap into a fitted cap. But baseball fans could not easily purchase a fitted cap of the kind the players wore.

  That changed in 1978, when New Era ran an ad in the Sporting News offering to sell fitted major-league baseball caps to anyone who sent the company $12.99, “check or m
oney order,” the kind of direct marketing Montgomery Ward pioneered in the previous century.

  New Era was inundated with orders, which was a blessing, as America was already eighteen years into a new New Era—a hatless age, ushered in when President Kennedy went without head cover at his 1960 inauguration. Almost instantly, men stopped wearing dress hats to ball games, or anywhere else.

  John Board was an usher at Crosley Field in Cincinnati in 1947, working for $1.50 a game. He escorted fans to their seats through the 1950s and ’60s, through the close of Crosley in 1970 and the opening of Riverfront Stadium in 1971, through the entire thirty-three-year duration of that new stadium and into the first decade of the Great American Ball Park, where he was still ushering, for $8.50 an hour, in 2010, when he told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the biggest changes he had seen in his sixty-three years of ushering were the increased presence of women and the increased absence of dress sense.

  “Used to be almost all men,” said Board. “Lots of people [now] wearing Reds hats, jerseys, shirts. Used to be mostly men in coats and ties and dress hats. They were more polite. Now, when you have a problem, they can be a little crude.”

  Baseball crowds had always been exceedingly male. In 1915, the Red Sox scorecard urged fans to VOTE NO ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE FOR THE PROTECTION OF YOUR WOMEN WHO DO NOT WISH TO BE FORCED INTO POLITICS. Forty years later, the same program ran an ad that read: “Some say it’s SEX, some say it’s Seaforth! The Shave Lotion that gives your face a zing! A zip! A lift! And its ‘Come-Heather’ aroma is really a gal-getter!” To illustrate the benefits of this $0.59 unguent, a model was literally draped over a man, wrapped around his neck like a shawl.

  It is strange, then, that as more women attended games, men began dressing not as if they were accompanying a date to the theater—as they had when no women at all attended—but rather as if they might be summoned, at a moment’s notice, into the game itself. The rise of officially licensed caps in the 1980s saw spectators entirely made over: in hats, but also in jerseys.