MLB: Stop the 1970s-80s Throwback Games Now

There was yet another disaster throwback game in the Bigs last Sunday, featuring the "California" Angels and the Oakland "A's".

While I like throwback games (they are a good idea, especially in history-rich baseball), teams should stop honoring those seventies and eighties designs.

Keep them in Fujifilm, where they belong.

I am a child of the eighties. I began playing baseball with pullover jerseys and Sansabelt pants, with the obligatory colored stripes on the V-neck, sleeve and waist.

We even wore that most-archaic of hosiery, the stirrup. Most of all, baseball uniforms were worn tight.

All of baseball—all of the world, for that matter—tended to wear tight-fitting garments starting in the late sixties and ending in the early nineties.

Baseball reflected this, captured so well in the last part of the 1988 film The Naked Gun, where "Umpire" Leslie Nielsen criticized a Mariners player for wearing too tight a uniform.

Nevertheless, he obsessively searched both teams' players for anything suspicious, despite the fact that anything underneath those spandex-tight uniforms would show up pretty clearly. 

Fast-forward to 2011. You have players wearing uniforms that could best be described as polyester pajamas and could easily hide a pistol.

Gone are most memorable aspects of the eighties' uniforms: the garish colors, the powder blues, the stirrups.

While a good idea in principle - who doesn't like having a laugh at those Padres uniforms of 1984?

Re-creating 1970s/80s garments and grafting them onto players of the 21st century is ill-advised.

It simply doesn't look right at all. It is sad reminder of the passing of groovy color-TV-era designs. Now we live with darker-hued, hip-hopified and baggy uniforms.

When the Angels played the A's last weekend, they brought out their eye-catching eighties uniform incarnations.

Nice try, but there were too many historical violations.

For one thing, the Angels wore belts. Belts! The attempts at stirrups were to wear solid-colored hose. Many players, given a chance to channel their inner funky Reggie Jackson, played it safe with pajama pants and billowy tops.

I know ballplayers are a far cry from the ironic hipsters one sees in, say, the East Village, but where's the fun in a throwback game if you can't properly throw back?   

Perhaps the most egregious violation of the Carter-era designs were the 2009 Minnesota Twins, who plucked their red-crowned hats out of 1979 and dropped them into an alternate uniform set that looked ridiculous.

I personally like those disco-era Twins threads, even the red hat/powder blue combination. But I like seeing them in old photographs, or perhaps in a clubhouse shop, not on Francisco Liriano.

A close second would be any club that tries powder-blue roadies on a weekend, circa 2011. This simply does not do my childhood memories justice.

Why not just throw back to the uniforms of the 1960s and before? Baseball uniforms were rather saggy from the John McGraw era until the Johnson Administration.

In many cases, such as the Tampa Bay "Smokers" - St. Louis Cardinals matchup earlier this year, the result is a terrific, atmospheric recollection of times past.

Except for the lack of stirrups, of course. But let's not be too persnickety.