The Look of the Game

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 In 1976, the Chicago White Sox stunned baseball by taking the field in Bermuda shorts, turning a desperate marketing gimmick into one of the strangest—and shortest-lived—uniform experiments in Major League history. 

 The tale of Chief Noc-A-Homa and Bernie Brewer traces how baseball’s early “real-life” mascots—one living in a stadium tepee, the other atop a scoreboard trailer—turned fandom into theater and helped shape the sport’s evolving sense of spectacle and identity. 

 Louis Van Zelst, the hunchbacked batboy of Connie Mack’s powerhouse Athletics, became baseball’s first beloved human mascot — a symbol of the sport’s uneasy shift from exploiting superstition to celebrating sentiment.