Along the Way: Hey batter, find some pants that fit

“Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.” — Bill Veeck

But you can dress like a bum, disgrace the sport in the process and still bank millions and millions of dollars a year.

Why must today’s plutocrat major league ballplayers, almost to a man, wear those sloppy, ill-fitting trousers — the cuffs of which virtually drag in the dirt?

Take a look at the teams in the playoffs; you’ll see what I mean.

This is one craze that can’t end soon enough.

Uniforms aren’t uniform, and that’s the bottom line. Some players still wear traditional knickers above stirrups — hosiery — in solid team colors or stripes.

But most of them knock around in disheveled, grubby, down-at-the-heels pants unfit for a scarecrow in a cornfield.

Five o’clock shadows, beards, dreadlocks, pigtails, dangly earrings and the sort of tattooing once displayed exclusively on carnival midways are part of the new look, and that stuff is bad enough.

But droopy drawers are worse.

In 1868 a classy ball club known as the Cincinnati Red Stockings introduced knickers to the sport. They also introduced scarlet socks, which some people at the time denounced as immoral. Supposedly, the exposed hosiery made young ladies at the ballpark blush.

The knicker look lasted well over 100 years, with various, slight modifications. Young ladies quit blushing as time went on.

In a beautifully written article some years ago for the Village Voice — it should have won at least a Pulitzer, if not a Nobel Prize — Paul Lukas wrote that in the early days of the game, textile dyes weren’t colorfast and baseball players who got spiked in the shin “risked blood poisoning if dye from the torn stocking entered the wound.”

So the stockings became stirrups, instead, and white sanitary socks were worn underneath.

Eventually, stirrup openings became larger and the white sanitaries, as Lukas wrote, “evolved from a practical necessity into one of baseball’s unique visual signatures.”

Pant cuffs gradually lowered, but not much, and baseball had the neatest uniforms of any sport.

In the 1960s the upper stirrup was raised and the pant cuffs were lowered into a rather stupid look. And Charles O. Finley, owner of the Oakland Athletics, brought out ghastly yellow sanitaries to go with the team’s green socks.

But other than that, baseball uniforms maintained their dignity until today’s despicable clown-pants came on the scene.

Bill Veeck once outfitted his Chicago White Sox in bermuda shorts, which was silly.

Thirty-five or 40 years ago a few teams began wearing “pill box” caps — flat on top with horizontal stripes — and they were really dumb.

I believe it was the old Denver Bears of the Western League who once wore uniforms on which the strike zone, at the time from knees to arm pits, was painted.

And the Pittsburgh Pirates experimented with polo helmets as a forerunner to today’s batting helmet.

But nothing in the history of the game, not even tobacco juice splattered on shirts, has dishonored the game’s dignity as much as today’s dirt-dragging, over-sized, rumpled britches.

Bring back the knickers.

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson writes a weekly column for the Green Valley News.