Major-League Smokers And Other Missed Opportunities

Sports Illustrated just published online 25 Things We Miss in Baseball. The list, which includes prosaic things like stirrups, no pepper signs, and high leg kicks, is largely hit-or-miss. I would, though, gladly welcome back into the game Youppi, the Expos mascot of indeterminate origins, and bullpen carts. Ditto balanced schedules and, if I'm being honest, organ music.

More interesting, I think, is the magazine’s companion 1o Things We Don’t Miss in Baseball, particularly numbers 5 and 7—Terrible Uniforms and Players Smoking in the Dugout—which, as a fan, I desperately want to see put back into practice right away, like before the first pitch of tonight’s game. Seriously, who wouldn’t want to see, say, Roy Oswalt taking the mound in this? Or Jamie Moyer lighting up in between innings, like Harvey Haddix did throughout his 13-inning, near-perfect game on May 26, 1959? 

I'm serious. Who wouldn't get a kick out of seeing this every night?

 

Or this?

Hell yeah. In fact, the more I think about these two lists, the more I realize that if I were to put together a Venn Diagram, the Cardinals-era Keith Hernandez, with his stirrups, quality stache, reported philandering, cookie-cutter, faux-grass home park, old-school manager, and, most importantly, his pack of smokes, would be its union. Just one more reason to love Mex. Thanks, SI, for a job well done. 

Wardrobe Malfunctions

Pitchers and catchers don't report for another 10 days, the Knicks are in the middle of brutal stretch of games and I am so hungover my fingernails hurt. (Damn you, Adam Graves). What better way, then, to kill some time on a gray February afternoon than by making fun of some truly heinous-looking uniforms from back in the day? Like this timeless orange, yellow and black Vancouver Canucks ensemble from the early 1980s. 

The uniform brings to mind William H. Macy's brilliant line from State and Main: "It looks like Edith Head puked, and that puke designed these costumes."

As much as these garbage bag-inspired eyesores must have infuriated the hockey players who had to don them 41 nights a year, members of the Colorado Caribous of the defunct North American Soccer League would have grabbed them off the rack in a second, in favor of this monstrosity of fringe.


I'm pretty sure this is the look Buffalo Bill was going for in Silence of the Lambs.

And then there's this technicolor turnout, which in addition to the Nuggets play, probably induced its fair share of Gran Mal seizures throughout the Denver area during the first half of the Reagan Administration.  


Thing looks like a costume from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Broadway production of The White Shadow.

(Via New York's Daily News).