Why do baseball coaches wear uniforms?
Dear Straight Dope: Why are coaches in baseball assigned a number like the players? What’s the point anyways? And why do they wear a uniform at all? As far as I know, baseball is the only sport where this is the case… — IreadMinds Well, a little reading could have cleared this up, champ, but we’ll be nice and lift the veil of confusion. Let’s hop in Peabody’s Wayback machine, to the late nineteenth century, and examine the beginnings of organized sport in the United States. Basketball was invented by a gym teacher, who promptly set the standard for a coach who didn’t participate in the game. Hockey and football also tended to utilize this sort of arrangement. In baseball, on the other hand, the “captain” was almost uniformly a member of the team until after the turn of the century. Most teams may indeed have had men serving as “manager,” but their job was not to guide the team on the field; rather, the manager took care of travel arrangements and served more as a team’s traveling sec
