Babe Ruth wore these threads when he ate hot dogs on the bench and won his third World Series in 1918. Ted Williams had them on when he became the best hitter in baseball nearly three decades later. Pedro Martinez wore them when he pitched his way to back-to-back Cy Young awards in 1999 and 2000. Heck, Cy Young himself sported these duds.
History alone is enough to get the Boston Red Sox uniform into a best-ever conversation thanks to the legends who’ve buttoned up—or, for a brief period in the late ’40s, zipped up—the classic white-and-red jersey. That the uniform itself is one of the sharpest and cleanest designs on the field is gravy. Largely unchanged over time, and without names cluttering the backs of home jerseys, Boston’s look pays homage to the past. And what better park than Fenway to preserve the magic of baseball history?
The Red Sox franchise began in 1901 as the Boston Americans, but the Sox name was born seven years later when owner John I. Taylor literally named his team after a pair of socks: He saw the red socks with the uniform, and that was that. Simple, but it worked. The team applied the same straight-ahead, do-what-works philosophy to the rest of the uniform. In 1908, the collared white jersey featured a red sock on the chest—and that’s as flashy as it ever got. The team fiddled briefly, ditching the collar and the sock logo, adding thin grey pinstripes, then subtracting them, and lengthening and shortening the sleeves. But by 1932, the home jersey was a near facsimile of the one we know today.
The bulk of the tinkering in recent years has involved the socks. For more than six decades, Boston wore red-white-and-blue stirrup socks, which were abandoned in favour of solid red non-stirrup numbers in 2003. Late last decade the team switched to navy, but was met with the wrath of fans who felt they closely resembled the ones worn by the “damn Yankees,” so the BoSox switched back to red. The classic “B” on the cap has changed in colour, but in design has been the same almost from the start.
Catch a game at Fenway and the whole atmosphere conjures up the memories and history of what’s happened here over the past century. Look down at the field and those nameless jerseys, those timeless uniforms that have endured the test of time, and you get the feeling it could be any year, any Red Sox team playing out there. It’s baseball. Pure and simple.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.