The Monkey Cage

People become fans of a certain sports team for lots of different reasons. In honor of our guest-blogger, Jim Gimpel, I’ll stipulate that the most common reason is geography: If you’re an American and the U.S. hockey team is playing Canada, then those nice neighbors from the north are The Enemy and it’s cheer, cheer, cheer for the Good Old USofA. If you’re from the North Side, you’re likely to be fan of the Cubbies, but if you’re a South Sider, then it’s Go Go, Sox.

Of course, there are other reasons as well. I have a friend who’s a die-hard Cleveland Indians fan, even though, as far as I know, he’s never even set foot in that lovely city.

As for me, I cheer for teams with classy uniforms. That may be silly, but so are the other reasons why people cheer for certain teams. I don’t care at all about professional football, but when I see elegantly clad, fashion-plate teams like the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders (maybe there’s something about the Bay Area — but consider the gold and green travesty of the Oakland A’s)), my heart starts going pitter-patter. They’re lookin’ GOOD. (Even the much despised Washington NFL team — whose team name is so awful that I refuse to utter it — Iooked great last season when they donned white pants.)

I grew up loving baseball, but never had a home team to cheer for. So the Dodgers and the Cardinals became “my” teams because their uniforms were so clearly superior to anything the opposition could muster. I never fell under the spell of he Yankee pinstripes, though I admit that their stripeless visiting grays are classy, and so are their hats. The Dodgers still look great, and so do the Cardinals when they’re not wearing those off-putting blue caps.

All the foregoing is simply to establish that I care how teams look. And that leads me to note one of the two most unappealing trends of the past decade or so in sports team uniforms. The one I’m not going to dwell on is the comically baggy shorts that many basketball teams, especially at the college level. The one that concerns me here, as it must any other baseball fashionista, is the tendency of today’s baseball players to wear their pants all the way down to the tops of their shoes — an abominaton that has robbed the game of the oh-so-aesthetically-pleasing sight of the stirrup overlaying the white sanitary hose, If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then (a) you are unaware of how far the once-dominant stirrup has fallen, in which case (b) I need to show you what you’re missing:

I could almost become a Yankee fan if Derek Jeter and his teammates would do the right thing and wear stirrups instead of tugging their pants legs down as far as they can possibly be tugged.

Do you think I’m the only person on earth who could possibly care about such stuff? Wrong again!.