Why do baseball players wear stirrups? They don’t seem very functional. I wore them all through Little League and on my softball team, and all they seem to do is fall down and bunch up around my ankles.
“We need more monkeys!”
Who cares.
Baseball sucks.
Now for a real answer.
Stirrup socks add color to a uniform. They are decorative and that’s about it. Most players now wear their pants long so the stirrups don’t show anyway.
To expand on BobT’s answer:
In the early days, some owners had their players wear colored socks to complement the uniforms. However, the colors often bled onto the players’ feet. After that, someone (I don’t know exactly who) came up with the idea of colored stirrups over white socks, and the rest is history.
Chaim Mattis Keller
cmkeller@compuserve.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
As for why they STILL wear them, baseball is a sport that’s rooted in tradition, and it’s a nod to days gone by.
Although many players nowadays wear their stirrups really short, so it just looks like colored socks again. Mark Grace is an exception.
Sucks to your assmar.
Lest you think that tradition is not something that holds much sway over what players wear on the field, when some catchers attempted to switch from traditional masks to something more like what a hockey goalkeeper wears, MLB insisted on re-designing the goal-keeper masks to look more ‘traditional.’
I have played college baseball for three years now. In a program with a limited budget stirrips are essential. This is because you can wear them over and over again and all you ever have to change is the white sanitary socks you wear under them. One year we tried switching to colored socks like soccer players wear. To outfit each guy with four pairs of socks, which is necessary to accomodate our needs for our longest road trip, it cost about $1200. When we switched back to the stirrip and sanitary sock combination is was more like $500, . My best guess would be that early baseball teams were faced with similar budget dillemnas and had to relegate themselves to stirrips and sainitary socks. The only reason stirrips are around today then, would be because of tradition.
Goofball: I hope your nick wasn’t bestowed upon you by your teammates.
Reminds me of my own idyllic days on the diamonds…my Old Man was so proud when he learned that my nickname was “No-hit Ike.” Then he found out I wasn’t a pitcher.
Uke