The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  In 1985, Peter Capolino, the middle-aged owner of Mitchell & Ness, an eighty-year-old sporting-goods store in Philadelphia, found, in a warehouse in that city, twelve thousand yards of wool flannel. Even to a visionary merchant doing growing business in the sale of baseball caps, seven miles of flannel did not instantly look like a red carpet rolling out, or a revenue stream running to the horizon. That it would become both of those things—leading him to Hollywood parties and tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue—was beyond the scope of even his imagination.

  Which is not to say that Capolino lacked creative spark. On the contrary, with his flannel treasure, he obtained a license to make old baseball jerseys, exacting in detail, meticulously reproduced in color, cut, fabric, and embroidery. The hot hair shirts that players couldn’t wait to take off were coveted by bankers and dentists gripped by boyhood nostalgia for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants—“older, white, conservative males who have this thing [for baseball] that goes back to childhood,” as Capolino put it.

  At the same time, these jerseys became popular with rappers and filmmakers. A 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers jersey was the most versatile of garments, one that could say both “hip-hop” and “hip replacement,” depending on who was wearing it.

  Director Spike Lee was seldom photographed in anything but a blue or white Brooklyn Dodgers cap. In his 1989 film Do the Right Thing—set in Brooklyn on the hottest day of the summer—Lee played a pizza delivery guy named Mookie who sweltered in a Jackie Robinson jersey, much as the Dodgers’ predecessors, the Superbas, had sweltered in their jerseys on Brooklyn’s hottest day eighty-eight years earlier. Only now, jerseys were fraught with cultural symbolism. As racial tensions reached a boil in Do the Right Thing, a black character, Buggin’ Out, has his new Air Jordans scuffed by a white man wearing—a deliberate provocation—the Boston Celtics jersey of Larry Bird.

  The summer after Do the Right Thing, the Chicago White Sox—always a fashion-forward franchise—looked backward for inspiration, playing a “Turn Back the Clock” game against the Brewers in the uniforms from their last championship season. Even a Cubs fan could recognize the beauty of those 1917 Sox uniforms, especially in contrast to their uninspired contemporary double-knits.

  To a large segment of the population, the retro caps and jerseys that came to be called “throwbacks” were divorced from team loyalties. They were largely about fashion. New Era became the exclusive supplier of caps to every team in Major League Baseball in 1993, and three years later Spike Lee asked the company to make him a red Yankees cap. The director promptly wore it to the World Series, at Yankee Stadium, stirring enormous demand for alternative caps for major-league teams. Before long, New Era was making more than 120 different Yankees caps alone, and the 59Fifty cap—named for its original model number—had become a staple of American streetwear, the circular gold sizing sticker left on the brim. Deposed Libyan dictator Mu‘ammar Gadhafi was executed moments after being pulled from a drainage pipe in his hometown of Sirte, where he’d been discovered by a young rebel who wore—as a new era dawned for his country—a camouflage-patterned Yankees cap.

  One of the first stores to carry the Mitchell & Ness uniforms was Distant Replays in Atlanta, where the rap duo Outkast bought retro Braves and Cubs uniforms, which they wore in the photo that appeared in the liner jacket of their platinum 1998 album, Aquemini. When that album blew up, so did uniform sales. In 2001, Capolino hired a young African-American customer named Reuben Harley as his liaison to the music industry, and soon the two of them—Capolino and “Big Rube”—were consorting at parties and premieres with hip-hop stars like Fabolous, Big Boi, Scarface, and P. Diddy, who called the garrulous Capolino “P. Chatty.”

  And yet, when I asked Capolino which star he was most excited about meeting, he answered “Eulah Street,” the woman who did the chain-stitching embroidery on Stan Musial’s St. Louis Cardinals jerseys.

  Given the beauty of those garments, it is perhaps unsurprising that Turn Back the Clock games have become a staple not only of baseball but of every sport, and a lucrative marketing scheme. By 2011, New Era was making thirty million caps a year.

  Their caps are now infinitely more numerous in the stands—and on city streets around the world—than they are on the baseball field. As one example among countless, an “underground urban streetwear” emporium called 5Pointz, in Bristol, England, offers 120 varieties of New Era baseball caps, for the youngster on the southwest coast of the United Kingdom who has never heard of the Texas Rangers but remains in thrall to hip-hop fashion. The company has offices in Hong Kong, Paris, and Cologne, and New Era stores in London, Berlin, and Toronto, in addition to New York City.

  In 2011, New Era opened an 1,100-square-foot store in Tokyo, in the youth-culture hothouse of Harajuku, supplying Japanese hipsters with an endless array of Major League Baseball caps but also a selection of men’s dress hats—including the eight-paneled newsboy number that started it all ninety years earlier. Those caps were part of the company’s EK line, named for Ehrhardt Koch, who achieved something remarkable: He literally elevated the lowly American baseball cap onto heads around the world, including in the former Soviet Union, where that utilitarian “rag”—as Khrushchev called the baseball cap—thrives long after the demise of Communism.

  Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, those nostalgic for the Cold War could buy a baseball cap embroidered with the letters CCCP, or KGB, or simply a hammer and sickle, a development Khrushchev is unlikely to have foreseen, much less welcomed, on that blistering day at Borobodur.

  As for New Era, its headquarters are still in downtown Buffalo, but no longer on the third floor of a storefront on Genesee Street. In a parting of fortunes for baseball and the American economy, New Era now occupies a venerable glass-and-steel edifice on Delaware Street, in a building once home to the United States Federal Reserve Bank.

  Chapter 5

  THE BEANPROOF CAP OF

  FOULPROOF TAYLOR

  The baseball cap had briefly crossed over into the wider world of civilian fashion by 1910, when Men’s Wear magazine devoted an item in its Hat Chatter column to an exciting innovation in headwear. Fred Clarke, the player-manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, had designed a new cap for use in the sun field, that part of the diamond from which a fielder was forced to look directly into the sun, a position unloved by all but Pete Browning, for whom staring into the sun did wonders for the lamps.

  “The cap has a long aluminum peak to which a pair of smoked glasses are fastened with a hinge,” Men’s Wear said of Clarke’s creation. “There is also a strong spring arrangement, and when not in use the glasses lie up against the peak of the cap in a horizontal position. All that is necessary to make them fall over the eyes is a touch of the finger, and this is far easier than pushing an ordinary pair of glasses from the point of the nose upward.”

  If not quite the birth of cool, it was the birth of flip shades, the coolest fashion ever spawned by baseball. “We never heard of flip-down sunglasses,” Ty Cobb wrote in his autobiography, while launching into a get-off-my-lawn litany of other luxuries enjoyed by modern players of the 1950s, including “gloves with fantastic webbed extensions,” “outfield walls with cinder-track borders,” and—these kids today—“finely clipped infield grass.”

  Cobb would have been familiar with ordinary sunglasses on the baseball field, though. As early as 1888, Paul Hines of Indianapolis “has taken to wearing smoked glasses while fielding,” reported Sporting Life. “He does this to shield his eyes from the sun. When batting he discards them.” Within a decade, more players began wearing smoked glasses, protecting their eyes in the dawn of a new century.

  Casey Stengel, photographed in shades in the Brooklyn sun field in 1915, wore them. Even Cobb, who would claim to have never heard of flip shades, was photographed wearing sunglasses at the plate in 1926, after eye surgery. “No outfielder should balk at wearing sunglasses,” he wrote. “In some fields they are absolutely necessary. A li
ttle practice will accustom you to the use of them.”

  Stengel in sunglasses. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  As a twenty-two-year-old rookie with the Yankees in 1933, Dixie Walker borrowed teammate Ben Chapman’s flip shades and botched a fly ball as Babe Ruth screamed at him from left field. Which was rich, as Ruth didn’t care for sunglasses—he never “accustomed” himself to the use of them—and never played the sun field. Perhaps it was that ninety-seven-degree day in his National Guard uniform, attempting to catch flies dropped from an airplane, that put Ruth off fielding baseballs beneath a hot sun. But his refusal to play the sun field accounts for his frequent switch-fielding, which saw him shuttling between left and right, in opposition to the sun’s transit across the sky. Bob Meusel was the cursed teammate forced to play the sun field every day, and liked to say that he was performing a kind of parlor trick: which is to say, Meusel wore sunglasses to protect Ruth’s eyes.

  “The Babe can’t play the sun field,” his manager Bill McKechnie conceded in 1935, when Ruth was with the Boston Braves for his final season as a player, creating a dilemma for his new manager. “But he’s used to right field. Right field is the sun field in only a couple of American League parks. But it’s the sun field in six of the eight parks in our league.”

  In the 1932 World Series, Ruth had played left field at Wrigley because right was in the sun. “I played the sun field for 10 years and used to be fairly good,” Stengel said, “not like Babe Ruth, who they never let play those sun fields and they’d switch him with Bob Meusel, so it would not hurt his eyes.”

  Even way back in 1897, Jack Boyle of the Phillies was complaining that first base in Philadelphia “is the worst position to play in the league owing to the sun.”

  “According to Jack,” confirmed a Sporting Life correspondent, “no other sun field is quite so bad.”

  In inventing flip shades, then, Fred Clarke was solving a very real problem, as he was wont to do. He had patented a pulley system for deploying the tarp more efficiently, and claimed to have invented sliding pads. When he wasn’t managing the Pirates, Clarke managed a ranch in Winfield, Kansas, where he kept a mule named Honus in honor of his best player. (Clarke wired the Pirates’ office one winter with the cardiac-arresting message, “Sold Honus for $190. Particulars later.”)

  Indeed, Wagner, with his giant melon, would become the most famous advocate of the original flip shades, the kind that were literally bolted to the brim of the cap. A version he wore as a Pirates coach in 1940 is enshrined in Cooperstown, the smoked glasses secured by three long spindles that protrude through the top of the brim a good two inches. It looks less like the handiwork of Fred Clarke than of an acupuncturist or voodoo priest.

  To avoid having spindles in his brim, Red Sox right fielder Harry Hooper secured his smoked glasses by means of a string looped through two holes punched in the bill of his cap. By 1951, when rookie Mickey Mantle lost a fly ball while wearing flips in spring training, the lenses were hinged to empty eyeglass frames. “You got to find the ball before you flip down the glasses,” teammate Hank Bauer told the Mick.

  “Casey didn’t tell me that,” Mantle replied.

  DiMaggio wore them. Cool Papa Bell wore them. As with everything else, Willie Mays wore the hell out of them, so much so that he signed a $3,000 endorsement deal with Foster Grant in 1954. A pair of flip shades he wore in the 1960s—with green lenses on black frames and MAYS spelled in black punch tape on the left arm—sold at auction in 2002 for $7,589. While artfully running out from under his cap, Mays made sure the flip shades stayed on by means of a wide rubber band athletic-taped to the earpieces.

  Fred Clarke lived to see Mays rock the flip shades. Three months before Clarke’s death, in 1960, a writer visited the eighty-seven-year-old at his ranch in Winfield. During the interview, Clarke sipped a bourbon highball—his doctor allowed him two a day—and lamented that the mementos of his baseball life had vanished in a fire years earlier. He had no flip shades to show the reporter, though one of his two daughters, Muriel Sullivan of Newkirk, Oklahoma, “has carefully guarded the records which show that her father patented the method of handling the canvas used to protect the playing field, the flip-down eye glasses used by outfielders on sunny days and sliding pads.” If Clarke made any money from any of these inventions, the fact was hardly worth mentioning. Oil had been discovered beneath his ranch forty-three years previously, making him in 1917 an instant millionaire. Fred Clarke died an enormously wealthy man, the embodiment of the phrase “made in the shade.”

  Sunglasses that didn’t flip up and down had been used as—and at—sporting spectacles since at least the time of ancient Rome, when Nero viewed the gladiators through an emerald.

  By 1911, they were already making baseball too easy. “Smoked glasses of late years have been of immense advantage in these sun parlors,” the New York Times reported that spring, “as the player can see the ball even when it is on the edge of the sun.”

  Those who chose to play without them were, like Icarus, punished by the sun for their hubris. When Tris Speaker couldn’t field a Joe Dugan popup, he saw it in the next day’s papers: “Speaker, scorning the aid of smoked glasses, lost Dugan’s fly in the sun, the ball dropping out of his hands for a technical two-bagger.”

  But even Nero never wore shades to such fearsome effect as Ryne Duren, the Yankees reliever of the late 1950s whose terrible eyesight—20/70 in his right eye, 20/200 in his left—required him to pitch in sunglasses thick as bottle bottoms.

  On the advice of eye doctors, Duren wore a pair with gold lenses for afternoon games and pink lenses for night games, with earpieces that wrapped all the way around the ears and were mummified in trainer’s tape so as not to fly off his face during his flame-throwing exertions. Summoned from the bullpen, Duren would sometimes throw his first hundred-mile-an-hour warm-up pitch over the catcher’s head to the backstop, after which he might theatrically clean his lenses with a handkerchief. When Duren couldn’t read the signs from his catcher, manager Casey Stengel had Elston Howard’s fingers painted red with Mercurochrome. Duren’s eyesight was so bad that Gus Triandos of the Orioles came to the plate one night while Duren was on his knees, running his hands over the pitcher’s mound to repair a hole left by the opposing pitcher.

  “What’s he doing?” Triandos asked, to which Yankees catcher Yogi Berra replied, “Trying to find the rubber.”

  In all, Duren owned seven pairs of sunglasses. His gold “twilight” sunglasses were sold in the Sotheby’s auction of Barry Halper’s collection, but Duren wrote to the collector that “I have kept the rose-tinted glasses for myself.” As well he should. Having overcome alcohol abuse, and lobbied for beer-free sections in ballparks, Duren was entitled to view the world through those rose-tinted glasses. When he died in Lake Wales, Florida, in 2011, aged eighty-one, he left a happy memoir called I Can See Clearly Now, a title that was metaphorically, if not ophthalmologically, accurate.

  “He had several pair of glasses,” Berra said at the time of Duren’s passing. “But it didn’t seem like he saw good in any of them.”

  Flip shades didn’t make Willie Mays cool—it was the other way around—but flip-down sunglasses remain tied, sometimes literally, to the coolest players of the 1960s and ’70s. On his 1980 Topps card, Ralph Garr of the White Sox memorably wore his flipped up, like the raised visor of Sir Galahad’s helmet. On his own cards, behind the limousine windows of his flip shades, Garr’s teammate Chet Lemon maintained a rakish panache even while enduring that team’s short-lived short pants. But then flip shades, like so many of baseball’s accessories, were as much fashion as function. Reds infielder Bip Roberts was uncannily photographed in action for a succession of baseball cards in the 1990s while gazing at a summer sky, waiting for an infield fly to descend, his shades always defiantly flipped up, useless except as a fashion accessory.

  Pete Rose wore flips, up, on his 1976 Topps card. When Rose was chasing Ty Cobb’s all-time hits
record in 1985, collector Barry Halper gave him an eighty-pound bronze bust of the Georgia Peach, who became part of the Reds’ traveling party that summer. Home or away, equipment manager Bernie Stowe would set Cobb out in the clubhouse, and the players would dress him in cap and flip shades, causing Cobb—one can only presume—to slowly rotate in his marbled vault at Rose Hill Cemetery in Royston, Georgia.

  By the time Rose passed Cobb in ’85, flip shades were falling from their preeminent place of cool. They were probably finished as a phenomenon in 1987, when they became the wardrobe signature of sitcom character Dwayne Wayne, on The Cosby Show spin-off A Different World. Their decline was hastened by a Southern Californian named Jim Jannard, who in 1975 invented, in his garage, a motorcycle grip that paradoxically grew stickier with sweat. He sold these grips from the trunk of his car, along with other motorcycle parts, eventually designing athletic sunglasses for the company he named after his English setter, Oakley Anne.

  In 1986, wearing Oakley sunglasses, cyclist Greg LeMond became the first American to win the Tour de France, and wraparound “Oakleys” quickly became the sunglass fixture in baseball clubhouses.

  Ray Lankford still wore flips on his 1993 Fleer card, but he wore them up, like an arc welder at rest. The flip shades were largely a statement. For sun protection, Lankford—like Mays before him—wore his shades with the underscoring of eye black.

  Eye black has underscored the lamps of football players since at least World War II. The earliest photographic evidence of it yet discovered is a 1942 picture of Washington Redskins running back Andy Farkas. The Skins’ flamboyant owner, George Preston Marshall, had asked players to dress as Native Americans for a pregame publicity photo. Farkas burned cork and rubbed it beneath his eyes to mimic war paint, which he didn’t bother to wash off for the day’s game.