"For prospects rising through the Milwaukee Brewers’ farm system, and even established veterans on a rehab assignment, wearing lederhosen is a rite of passage."

"No, this isn’t some elaborate rookie hazing prank... it’s the result of Friday’s theme night at High-A Wisconsin, one in which the team normally known as the Timber Rattlers becomes the Brats as part of Bratoberfest, a play on Germany’s iconic Oktoberfest, while also paying homage to the state that’s home to one of the highest concentrations of residents with German ancestry. It just so happened that Abner Uribe, the Brewers’ flame-throwing reliever who is working his way back from a flexor strain, was in town on his rehab assignment...."

The NYT picks up the best Milwaukee Brewers story of the day: "Brewers’ Abner Uribe delights fans in ‘Brats’ lederhosen uniform during minor-league rehab."

Humiliating? Or is it wonderful... bratoberfestive!

I could watch the Green Bay Packers exhibition game, women’s college volleyball, the team with the best record in baseball the Milwaukee Brewers, the Winn-Dixie 250, high school football, WWE SmackDown, or…Abner Uribe in lederhosen. You tell me… pic.twitter.com/lZWfgdxMLi

— Steve Palec (@stevepalec) August 29, 2026

ADDED: I have a bit of a tags quandary for this post. I don't like tag proliferation, but this isn't the first appearance of lederhosen on this blog. It's the fourth. See them all here. But all the other times, I was able to use my well-loved tag "men in shorts." But this baseball take on lederhosen avoids the baseball travesty of shorts — White Sox, 1976 — and sticks with traditional knickers. As I've said before, I like the knickers and wish all the players would wear them and not those pajama-looking long pants, but I'm still not making a tag for knickers. But if I did, I'd have 12 "knickers" posts now. 

Let me highlight the best of those old "knickers" posts. I remembered that the Young Rascals wore knickers. I found this 1926 song with the lyric: "Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide/Nobody knows who's walking inside!" I said that David Brooks: "expatiated about the good old days when men like George Washington displayed their thighs in tight silk knickers."

And, in 2008, before I got together with Meade and started watching baseball again, there were TVs outside State Street Brats just as The Backstreet Boys were singing the national anthem to open the World Series. I blogged: "The players look like hell! When did they stop wearing stockings and knickers? Those long pants look like pajamas."

And there was Meade, the first commenter: "I must be smoking too much blog. I hallucinated." Because the video looked like this:



Key word linking the end of this post to the beginning: brats.

Players in pajamas.

I hadn't watched baseball in quite a few years, but I got married a few months ago and one of the many consequences is that I've been watching a bit of the World Series. I realize a sports game is not a fashion show, but I'm appalled at what these men are wearing. I remember when baseball players wore skin-tight knickers. (I remember that time the Chicago White Sox wore shorts.) And now, I'm seeing men that look like children in their jammies. Yes, I realize that they are probably 6 feet tall or so, but they don't look much like athletes — not like those players of old in their skin-tight knickers. Some combination of tubby body and oversized shirts and slouchy pants changes the proportions and scales the guys down into children. And yes, I can see that many — many! — of these boy-men are wearing — "sporting" — beards. It's all too "My Very First Beard - from Kenner!" It's not helping. I'm sorry! Baseball is just not sexy enough. This was better. And I hate men in shorts. Not fond of the mustache either. Come on, baseball men, raise your game. I know you're still allowed to wear the knickers-and-socks. I root for the players that still wear the knickers. Look like an athlete, could you please? Women might like to watch.

"It’s a little creepy to see this ancient bald man in knickers."

Let me blog Guy Trebay's amusing rant about famous people who need to change their style. The whole thing is good, but what tipped the scales to bloggable for me was the prime men in shorts material:

“People pick on Madonna unfairly,” [said Joe Levy, the editor of Blender], speaking of the star’s fanatical self-transformations.

It is certainly true that, in her role as seeker and radical self-improver, Madonna has provided a shiny alternative to a pop landscape that, without her, would doom audiences of the world to the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Shakira or, shiver, Angus Young.

Mr. Young, in case you’d forgotten, or never knew, is a guitarist and founder of the Australian metal band AC/DC. And he has been performing in the same stage garb for almost his entire career.

That is to say he has been wearing knickers and a schoolboy cap for twice as long as Miley Cyrus, the tween moppet, has been alive and honing a hapless sex-kitten routine.

Mr. Levy put it this way: “It’s a little creepy to see this ancient bald man in knickers.”

Angus Young? More like Angus Old. But Angus can do what he likes. I'm not going to invoke my "Men in Shorts" rule against Angus Young.

"Masculine Women! Feminine Man!"

I just stumbled into this song from 1926 with lyrics like "Masculine women, feminine men/Which is the rooster, which is the hen?/It's hard to tell 'em apart today" and "Knickers and trousers, baggy and wide/Nobody knows who's walking inside!"

The audio here is the Irving Kaufman version, from 1926, and the visual is a lot of pictures from movies of the 1910s/1920s/1930s (and from "Some Like It Hot," which is set in the 1920s): 

 

I wasn't looking for transgender-adjacent popular songs. What happened was, I was reading about various 1960s pop stars and saw this about Tiny Tim:

In a 1968 interview on The Tonight Show, he described the discovery of his ability to sing in an upper register: "I was listening to the radio and singing along; as I was singing I said 'Gee, it's strange. I can go up high as well.'" In a 1969 interview he said he was listening to Rudy Vallée sing in a falsetto, and "had something of a revelation – I never knew that I had another top register," describing it as a religious experience.

Through Spotify, I found the key Rudy Vallée recording, "Deep Night." I have listened to that recording a hundred times in the last month. I'm trying to understand all the mysterious elements that make me love that song. It's because of "Deep Night" that I've been delving into 1920s playlists on Spotify. That's what put me in a position to notice "Masculine Women! Feminine Man!" And I thought you'd enjoy the diversion.

Here's an instrumental version with an excellent collection of photographs of less famous people — presumably centering on the 1920s and showing many women dressed as men and men as women (or, perhaps, transgender men and women):

Here are the full lyrics, written by Edgar Leslie/James V. Monaco:

"So this is Fake Moos?"

A perfect comment on "Meet Knickers, the giant cow that is neither a cow nor a giant" (WaPo).

I don't know if you've been following this minor internet craze, but there's a steer in Australia that looks very large. The truth is that "Knickers is not a cow but a steer, and that males are typically quite a bit larger than females" an it's a Holstein standing around with some wagyu cattle, so it's a large breed seen in contrast to a small breed.

"I’ve warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!"

"When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up." 

Said Roald Dahl, quoted in "Roald Dahl promised to set a crocodile on anyone who changed his words" (London Times).

 

This is from a recorded conversation he had with the artist Francis Bacon in 1982.

Help me understand baseball uniforms.

Years ago -- in the 1970s -- I used to watch baseball on a little TV, and I thought the players looked great. Last night, I checked out a little of game 1 of the World Series. I don't think it was just the extra sharpness of HDTV:

The players look like hell! When did they stop wearing stockings and knickers? Those long pants look like pajamas. I remember tight pants. These are all baggy. What a bunch of slobs! And look at all that litter in the dugout. And all the nutshells in front of the dugout. Ugh! The aesthetics!

In the comments, Bart Hall wrote:

One reason for "baggy" pants is that any pitch brushing the uniform in any way is called as a hit batter, and most of the strike zone is down in the pants region. Even an ankle-high pitch brushing the pants gets a trip to first base.

Well, fine then. How about adapting this look for the ball park?

Did Althouse blog about baseball in the days before she aligned with Meade?

In the comments to the previous post — "Baseball baby" — Chance wrote:

It is interesting to see Meade's effect on Althouse's preferences. I think I've been reading this blog since 2004 and I can't really imagine Althouse watching baseball. The process has been slow and subtle. I'm sure this happens in most relationships, but it is fun to see how it percolates up into the blog.

This is the 203rd post with the tag "baseball," and 26 of them pre-date Meade. What did I blog about baseball, pre-Meade? Here are 16 things:

March 4, 2004: "Should we swoon over John Kerry because he responded to Dowd's culture questions with long, long answers, unlike George Bush, who, asked to name his favorite 'cultural experience,' said 'baseball'?"

June 7, 2005: "I know what it's like to need to breastfeed and be in a situation where there's nowhere private to go. One time, back in the early 80s, I breastfed my baby at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I remember feeling I was doing something really wrong and that I was about to be discovered at any point and treated harshly."

It's too cold for people to sit outside at State Street Brats.

But it was very pretty passing by just as the Backstreet Boys were singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" to open the World Series.



Sorry for the wind (and bus) noise, but I love when you can hear girls exclaiming "Sounds like the Backstreet Boys," "Yeah, it is!"

ADDED: When I got home, I watched a bit of the game on HDTV, and I was shocked. Is it just the HD? The players look like hell! When did they stop wearing stockings and knickers? Those long pants look like pajamas. I remember tight pants. These are all baggy. What a bunch of slobs! And look at all that litter in the dugout. And all the nutshells in front of the dugout. Ugh! The aesthetics!

Why Did David Brooks sit through an entire dinner with some Republican Senator's hand groping his (Brooks's) inner thigh?

I think the reason Brooks put up with the senatorial hand for so long is that he had decided to see if he could get the goods on the Senator. He was waiting for more, something distinct and reportable. A whispered proposition, perhaps. What a scoop it would be if that hand would scoop his scrotal sac! But this impromptu sting required Brooks to give zero encouragement, and the Senator was (presumably) waiting for a signal. Brooks also failed to nudge the amorous gentleman aside, in the obvious, ordinary way, and therefore, insanely, the 2 men spent the dinner in the silly hand-on-inner-thigh position. What rich comedy!

So Brooks didn't get his scoop, but he did flutter back to his NYT perch and peck out a column about dignity that a lot of Times readers seemed to love. (It topped the "most emailed" list for a while.) He expatiated about the good old days when men like George Washington displayed their thighs in tight silk knickers... I mean displayed high standards of dignity. But there is still hope, he tells us:

[I]t’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.

Yes, yes, there is the fact of President Obama. The fact of President Obama stirs hope in our loins. That man is the very embodiment of dignity and —d'oh! — there he is exemplifying looking at a girl's ass!

A song by men in knickers, searched out because Meade just said "Quit It" like that.

"I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore" — the first single by the Young Rascals. That clip is their first TV appearance (in 1965). I remember when their 2d single — "Good Lovin'" — came out: the radio DJ expressed relief that the band had improved the moral level of their music, as if "I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore" was rather smutty. I was 14 at the time, and it was only much later that I was able to imagine that the DJ had disaggregated the words "eat out" from the idiomatic expression "eat your heart out."

The lyric at 1:11 prompts a search for that Prince song... what is it? It's one of the "Purple Rain" songs. Ah! Here.

Was Prince influenced by The Rascals? Did Prince misconstrue the 1965 lyric like that DJ maybe did? We all know Prince got terribly smutty. It upset Tipper Gore so much:



MORE: On the great lyrics scare of 1984:

"Try out magic pants to hide lumps and bumps."

A clothes store company wants its sales staff to look good, but the staff is offended by the style guide. It's upsetting for the company to disclose that it thinks fat people should try to look slimmer. An eating disorder group attacks: "If you are the type of person who needs magic knickers this style guide might add to your insecurities." And the company apologizes: "On reflection, we've made a rather thoughtless mistake. What was intended as magazine-style fashion tips has caused offence which was never intended. We have withdrawn the leaflet and apologised for the error." ("Offence," "apologised"... yes, they are sensitive — and fat — in England too.)

Stripes: yes. Men in shorts: no.

And the baby agrees with me.

Now, to continue with my idiosyncratic review of fashion at the Farmers Market in Madison this morning:

1. Men in Shorts is a complex subject, and some men do better than others:



Note that the 2 men in shorts are both wearing black socks, yet only one is making a bad mistake. The other one is doing it right. Plus, carrying a kid on your shoulders is a good look for a nonsleazy guy.

2. Here are 2 women dressed completely differently, and both, I think, are completely charming:



3. I would also like to express my strong approval of this latter-day hippie look, heavy on the day-glo pink — and, in the case of "Cher," day-glo green:





And I'm giving hippie boy a pass on those knickers.

"Project Runway."

The challenge -- designing a "jet set" outfit for yourself -- was rather unfair, since the men got stuck designing men's clothes, and the designers all specialize in women's clothes. And the challenge was also a little boring. The most interesting thing was the ongoing tension from last week's show, where Jeffrey had to design for Angela's mother, who was whiny and had a bad figure (and may have been trying to make Jeffrey lose). Jeffrey took to taunting Angela, trying to rattle her. In the end, Angela lost -- deservedly -- and said that she'd learned that you have to know who you are and not let anyone rattle you. I don't know if Jeffrey succeeded in rattling her, but the plane ride to Paris succeeded in wrinkling the knickers she'd sewn for herself, and making clothes that travel well was part of the challenge.

Maybe I'm the only one, but I find myself rooting for that little asshole Jeffrey. He made an outfit he kept telling us was rock and roll, and it did look pretty cool, even after the long plane ride.

Laura, we've learned, is pregnant, and she was wearing 4 inch heels on the runway. The designers were told they had one hour to pack and get to the airport, and they needed to fly in the outfits they had on. Later, we see her in Paris, still in those 4 inch heels. I really did not enjoy seeing them stress out and physically challenge a pregnant woman like that.

Vincent, who started off the season seeming too crazy to be on the show, ended up making the sanest thing. Acually, I thought he'd lose because it was so plain. But it went through the travel part of the challenge quite well.

Kayne... they must love Kayne... because his outfit was really tacky. They kept saying it was going to be too Liberace, but then in the end, they just said it was Elvis. So that was an accomplishment, right?