Tag: Baseball

Ballbug is Memeorandum for baseball. (via TechCrunch)

Woohoo! It’s opening day of the 2006 baseball season.

From ESPN.com’s Page 2:

It’s gotta be the shoes, you say? Nuh-uh – it’s the socks.

Uni Watch is referring, of course, to the modest but undeniable renaissance of stirrups appearing on Major League Baseball diamonds.

This is a good thing. Stirrups are what make a baseball uniform a baseball uniform.

Teams at my little league wore ribbon-style stirrups. Because of their design, it seemed to me that the point of stirrups was to add team-colored stripes to the sides of your socks. Even though I thought wearing them was cool, I hated them during games. They were impossible to keep inside my shoes. I remember having to constantly jam them back under my heels. Loops of cloth dangling from the backs of your legs are very effective at tripping you up on the basepath. Over time, they seemed like more trouble than they were worth. Which I’m sure is the reason they now sell socks with stripes sewn onto them. Revolting.

It’s a shame that we didn’t wear real stirrups. As cool as wearing the ribbon stirrups was, it would have been at least twice as cool to know that I was wearing something baseball players had been wearing since about 1910. Sure, not every kid would have appreciated that. But I’m sure that I would have.

These days, I always root a little more for the guys who wear stirrups correctly. I think it says something about how they feel about their sport. It’s no surprise to me that the most disgraceful man in baseball wears his pants over his shoes.