Should professional baseball players wear knee-length or full-length pants?

Knee

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by Kevin Holten

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A poll of today's major league baseball players will reveal that most of their mommies tucked them in at night dressed in "jammies" with feet. That's the origin of their fetish for wearing baggy pants nearly covering their spikes. And oddly enough, the creator of this fashion trend is Mr. Perjury himself, Barry Bonds, the Home run King.

Now everyone knows that Michael Jordan, Mr. Basketball, transformed NBA fashion in the 90's, replacing the speedo shorts of the Magic Johnson, Larry Bird era with the baggy, show nearly no leg shorts of today.

And Barry, feeling pressured in the early 2000's to set some sort of fashion trend himself as Mr. Baseball in America, shaved his head like Michael and combined Michael's baggy uniform look with his Mommy's early jammie purchases, going with what he felt most comfortable wearing as he lay in bed at night.

Ultimately he brought his jammie bottoms along with him to what was then Pac Bell Park and gave them to the tailor of his San Francisco Giant uniform to copy.

The new style was picked up quickly by other major leaguers simply because it's normal for them to want to dress like the game's greatest player. And too, it felt so very natural, especially when it came to night games, because that's how their mommies had always dressed them before they went to bed.

Now Barry, controversial in most everything he does, was no different when it came to setting this new trend and it was a particularly difficult one for some baseball's major executives to accept, especially the owners of the Boston Red Sox who's very existence, image and name is based upon that which covers their players calves.

For awhile they feared that they might have to change the name of their team were this trend to continue but fortunately their former first baseman, Kevin Millar, came to the rescue and talked the rest of his teammates into "showing some sock" as they battled for the 2004 World Series title.

I personally find it very difficult to take seriously anyone who wears jammie bottoms on a baseball field and tend to root especially hard for those who style their uniform after the players of the forties and fifties. Especially Juan Pierre of the Dodgers who's uniform style varies not at all from that which was worn by the great Jackie Robinson.

I also think the jammie look takes away from the overall beauty of many team's uniforms, most notably the St. Louis Cardinals, the old Baltimore Orioles, the Oakland Athletics, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, as did the single stripe sock worn in the 1980's and still worn by Greg Maddux today.

I'm simply hoping that the trend doesn't spread back to basketball where players might simply quit taking off their warm up pants once the game begins. And to horse racing where flopping pants worn by the jockeys might slow down the times of our fastest race horses.

Thus I'd like to make a request to the Major League Baseball Players Association that they bring the socks backs to baseball. Obviously the inventors of the game had a reason for including them in the first place. So let's just assume that they knew something that Barry didn't.

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