Baseball fans opened their newspapers this morning to learn that a federal indictment of Barry Bonds on charges of perjury or tax evasion or both is imminent.  Bonds' attorneys will fight until his last dollar is gone, mucking up the sports pages with legal jargon and spoiling the innocence of T-ballers across the nation.

"Daddy," little Timmy asks.  "What's a plea bargain?"

And all the while, the guilty go free.  You know who I'm talking about.  The team that, for forty-three years, has disgraced major league baseball by donning clothes that no self-respecting professional athlete should wear, even behind closed doors.

I am referring to the Oakland A's, and their green, gold and white uniforms.

Oakland was famously described by expatriate poet Gertrude Stein with the put-down "There's no there there."  After a cup of coffee in the major leagues of literature, Stein has been sent back to the minors, but her aesthetic judgment is still solid, at least when it comes to the A's uniforms.   There's no there there, only a why, or maybe a whatthehell.

For the record, the A's have been around for 105 years, and have worn the green and gold for less than half of that period.  In 1963, Charles O. Finley, the owner of the then-Kansas City Athletics, decided to change the team's colors to Kelly Green, Fort Knox (or Finley) Gold and Wedding Gown White.  Four years later, he went further, replacing the standard black polish on the team's cleats with white.  That color combo remains in effect today, making the A's look like a bowling team that took a wrong turn on their way back to the bar and wandered out into the bright light of day.

Finley was responsible for other dubious innovations, all adopted in an effort to boost attendance for a losing team in a small market.  He installed  a mechanical rabbit named "Harvey" (after the imaginary rabbit in the Jimmy Stewart movie of the same name) behind home plate to deliver new balls to the ump.  You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of major league stadiums that currently feature the rabbit-o-matic ball service--if you're a one-armed man.

He put goats beyond the outfield fence in left field at Kansas City's Memorial Stadium to eat the grass.  He adopted a live mule--"Charlie-O"--as a mascot, and once brought it into the press room to annoy reporters after it had recently been fed.  In order to keep FoxSports.com free of inappropriate content, I will leave the rest of this incident to your imaginations.

Finley eventually moved the team to Oakland and turned it around, producing three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974.  He sold the team in 1981, but his legacy of lunacy lives on in those green and gold uniforms.  The team's mascot appears on the sleeves of their jerseys as a green elephant, thereby obscuring a part of baseball history.

The Athletics' original mascot--a white elephant--is pictured above.  The team acquired that nickname when John McGraw remarked that John Shibe and Connie Mack "had a White Elephant on their hands" when they bought the Philadelphia Athletics with the intention of competing against the Phillies, their cross-town rivals in the National League.  A white elephant, for those unfamiliar with a slang term that has fallen into disuse, refers to an item that once acquired is hard to get rid of.  (Tag sales were often referred to as "white elephant" sales by shoppers from generations past.)

Finley's color scheme violates aesthetic principles that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks.  As Aristotle noted in his Poetics, "It is essential when choosing the clothing to be worn by a group of athletes that one not make them appear as if they are a slow-pitch softball team.  Also, no vertical-striped socks like the AFL Denver Broncos."

So consider this a call to re-examine baseball's priorities.  Performance-enhancing drugs may represent the ugly side of a baseball player's will to win, but at least you can't see them when you turn on your TV.  The A's uniforms have got to go.

Copyright 2006, Con Chapman