The Bookshelf Conversations: Erin Corrales-Diaz

And now for something completely different.

When my wife and I were on vacation in London a few years ago, we stopped in at the world famous Harrod’s department store. While she went off to look for gifts and I ended up in the menswear section where I came across…

This was a strange yet welcome sight. Sadly I couldn’t justify spending the exorbitant cost.

It seemed strange because our trip was the year before the Red Sox and NY Yankees played a series in England. But Tokyo? Where does that come from, out of all the possibilities?

It just goes to show how baseball accoutrements, at least, have become a global thing. (Quick aside: There’s a guy at work who hails from the UK and I asked him they called a baseball cap there, since they really don’t play the sport? He looked at me as it it was the dumbest thing he ever heard and answered, “A baseball cap.”) So when I saw The Iconic Jersey: Baseball X Fashion, I knew I had to check it out, even though I’m the farthest from a fashionista as you can get.

The book, written by Dr, Erin Corrales-Diaz, is actually a catalog from an exhibition which recently closed at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. A good portion is devoted to the evolution of the uniform. It’s fascinating to look back and see how fancy these threads were, but then, at the time of its inception, baseball was considered a game for gentlemen. They became more practical, if such a word can be applied to the heavy flannels worn during the dog days of summer, at the beginning of the 20th century.

At some point during the 1970s, however, fans started wearing facsimile attire of their favorite teams and players, another way to show their allegiance and identify as part of a community.

Corrales-Diaz, the museum’s Assistant Curator of American Art, did a marvelous job of assembling the collection and explaining the expansion of the jersey into a wider population of those who might not have any other connection with baseball. You will also learn how much goes into putting together such a exhibit, often taken for granted by patrons of the arts: The planning, coordination, negotiations, and execution take years. And the pandemic didn’t make things any easier.

(I wonder if Jerry Seinfeld had a chance to experience the WAM program. Of course, there are those who refute his assertion that fans are basically “rooting for clothes.”)