The great DIYer Wafflebored was recently in town for a few weeks. I took him to my favorite vintage clothing shop, where he quickly located a rack full of old jerseys. I was particularly interested in the 1950s-ish baseball jersey shown above, because it still had its original hang tag — a rarity for a vintage clothing item, and even more so for an old jersey.
Let’s zoom in for a closer look at that tag:
Love it! Such a nice piece of two-color design. I particularly like the bookended basketball players at the bottom. I’m presuming the “M” on the guy’s jersey is for “Maple.”
But it wasn’t until I got home and looked again at the photo that I realized the weirdest thing about the hang tag: The baseball player is laying down a bunt! I realize bunting was a bigger part of the game when this jersey was produced than it is today, and I want to make it clear that I have plenty of respect for bunting as a skill and as a strategy, but this depiction still seems like a very odd choice. I mean, who makes a purchasing decision based on an image of someone bunting? Wouldn’t it be better to show a pitcher in mid-windup, a batter about to swing, an outfielder reaching for a fly ball, or something along those lines?
Since the illustration of the bunting ballplayer shows that his uni number ends in a zero, it made me think of midcentury Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto, who wore No. 10 and was such an accomplished bunter that he led the American League in sacrifices for four consecutive seasons!
The Rizzuto connection notwithstanding, I was still puzzled by the choice of putting a bunter on the hang tag. I thought to myself, “Topps would never show someone bunting on their baseball card, would they?” Wrong — turns out there’s a shit-ton of Topps cards that show players bunting. There’s even a SABR article about that very topic!
That got me thinking: What would be the football, basketball, or hockey equivalents of a bunt, at least in visual terms? Like, if you wanted to show a player in those sports doing something unglamorous and arguably even a bit unmanly-seeming, what would it be? Hmmm.
Getting back to the vintage jersey that Wafflebored found, here’s a look at the inside of the hang tag, along with the brand label on the jersey’s inner collar:
I was not familiar with Maple Athletic, but some quick research reveals that they were an old-school sportswear manufacturer that lasted into the late 1990s. The company’s founder, Martin Surkin, died in 2012 at the age of 92. That prompted Ebbets Field Flannels founder Jerry Cohen to write a nice obituary, in which he explained how Maple did lots of work for Ebbets and for Mitchell & Ness when those two operations were getting started.
There are about two dozen vintage Maple items — jackets, mostly, along with a few other products — currently available on eBay. None of them appears to come with an original hang tag, but I was intrigued by this pair of satin basketball shorts that are being offered with their original box:
Very nice! And to think that we learned all of this because Wafflebored found an interesting jersey at a vintage shop. I love it when things just develop spontaneously like that.
Speaking of which, Wafflebored felt pretty certain that the vintage Maple jersey would fit me well, so I went ahead and tried it on:
Not a bad fit, but I can’t get too excited about a jersey that’s blank on both sides. Fortunately, the hang tag provided plenty of interest all by itself.
Meanwhile, to learn about another rabbit hole that resulted from our visit to that vintage shop, check out this recent post over on Inconspicuous Consumption.
Uni Watch, created by Paul Lukas, has been covering the world of athletics aesthetics since 1999. He also writes Inconspicuous Consumption, which is sort of like Uni Watch for everything other than sports.
Would the football equivalent of a bunt be… a QB taking a knee at the end of a game??
When I saw “bunting” in the title of this post, I thought patriotic fabric or a pleated fan or some kind of decoration.