From the WSJ, a story on baseball’s most distinctive accoutrement—the stirrup sock:
Early stirrups were white, just inches high. Sewn to the ends of dyed tubes, they blended with the undersocks, making them hard to see. Then designs advanced to one-piece solids, and the half moons rose. When Twin City began knitting, they had risen to a six-inch cut, what hosiery classicists regard as the baseball sock’s golden mean.
Yet the moons kept rising. “It was nine inches by the time I got here, in 1977,” Fran Davis, now Twin City’s president, said in his mill office, a stirrup display on the credenza. “Then it was 12 and 15.” Then it was a ribbon, then a one-layer sock with a stripe . . . . .
In the big leagues, the half-moons of the game’s “stirrups” are in deep eclipse. Apart from old-schoolers like Jamie Moyer of the Philadelphia Phillies, who is 46, just a few players wear them. A good number play in plain high socks. The rest yank their pant legs down to the tops of their shoes, over their shoes and even hook them to the cleats under their shoes.
Teams may try to make major leaguers obey rules about caps or beards, but below those multimillion-dollar kneecaps, it’s chaos. To fans who know how stirrups look, that hurts. In the opinion of Paul Lukas, ESPN blogger and doyen of the sock obsessed, outfits failing to beautify the shin “dishonor baseball’s hosiery heritage.”
I still remember wearing stirrups on my baseball team in high school, and I’d love to see them make a comeback.
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