What a baseball historian can tell us about paying attention to detail

I’ve had a lifelong interest in the on-field fitted hats and jerseys worn by Major League Baseball players.

Growing up in the 1970s, my brother and I would order the hats by mail because they simply weren’t available in stores. And even then, the ones we received may have been licensed but not the actual on-field caps.

I was particular then and got only more so as I collected game-worn jerseys through the years.

Which is why I was both ecstatic and disappointed this summer when I learned about Philadelphia-based baseball historian Bill Henderson; the former because his passion, attention to detail and craftsmanship are astounding, the latter because I was so late finding out about him.

I had come across a game-worn jersey on eBay for former Baltimore Orioles pitcher Don Aase. The seller noted in his listing that Aase’s last name on the 1987-tagged jersey had been removed, so he had one re-created by The Dream Shop, a name with which I was unfamiliar.

“The Dream Shop is awesome,” the seller messaged me, “it’s run and owned by Bill Henderson who is also the author of ‘The Game Worn Guide to MLB Jerseys.’ ”

Soon I was on Henderson’s website, reading articles about him and by him, and purchasing his guide, which is much more than that considering it surpasses 4,300 pages and 15,000 photographs and consumes more than 828 MB of storage on my laptop.

It’s so big that purchasing it (or a smaller team-specific edition) is only possible via download. A hard copy with that many pages could put a dozing reader at risk for suffocation by tome (not to be confused with Thome, as in Jim).

Re-creating a Mantle flannel

But for those of us who love baseball history and care as much if not more about the game’s aesthetics as its athletes, entering Henderson’s world is an awesome privilege.

I’m a diehard Boston Red Sox fan, and I remember a book I had as a child in the 1970s. It chronicled a day behind the scenes of a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, from chalking the foul lines on the field to hawking hot dogs and pennants in the grandstand. Locked in my mind’s eye is the photograph of freshly laundered knit pullover jerseys, air-drying on the third-base warning track.

Per Henderson’s book, which is in its ninth edition and covers the years 1970-2020: “The Red Sox introduced pullover knit home uniform jerseys during the 1972 All Star Game, then the entire team switched to knits for the second half of the 1972 season. Home knits featured a red/blue/red trimmed V-neck but otherwise looked just like the flannels they replaced.”

Those jerseys, he notes, were made by a company called McAulliffe. By 1985, when I ordered an authentic Red Sox home jersey before leaving for college (again, these were not readily available in stores), the team had reverted to button-front jerseys that were made by Wilson.

Henderson notes, by year, how many colors the jersey numbers had, whether player names appeared on the back, and whether there were any special accoutrements, such as the sleeve patch the Red Sox wore in 1987 to celebrate Fenway Park’s 75th anniversary.

But as impressive as that historical record is, I’m blown away by how Henderson puts all of that knowledge to work restoring and customizing MLB jerseys. Here he becomes a forensics expert, putting old flannel jerseys on a light table and seeing traces of where numbers once had been.

Henderson has shared several of his jersey restoration case studies with the terrific blog Uni Watch, which describes itself as “a media project that deconstructs the finer points of sports uniforms, logos, related topics in obsessive and excruciating detail.”

You won’t find anything more obsessive — in a positive sense of the word — than following the step-by-step process of Henderson re-creating an authentic Mickey Mantle pinstripe flannel that had been relegated to use in the low minor leagues once The Mick was finished with it.

If you’d like to learn more about Henderson, I encourage you to read this Uni Watch Q&A or listen to this interview he did with baseball writer Rob Neyer, who’s also a member of the Society of American Baseball Research.

Henderson has contributed much to Major League Baseball, which is particularly relevant at a time when the stewards of the national pastime seem far less concerned with honoring its past than with how they’re going to wring more money out of its future.

If you ask me, plunking down $45.95 for the complete game worn guide or just $9.99 for a team edition (less than the price of one beer at Fenway) is the highlight-reel play of the season.