Work-in-Progress: Status of the Ty Cobb Sweater, June 2018

(Wow! Work-in-progress updates two months in a row. This is great!)

You'll be pleased to know that the Ty Cobb Sweater is coming along nicely. Last month, it was just a flat piece of knitting that, when strategically folded together, gave the impression of a sweater. Now...drumroll please...it will, in fact, pass for an ACTUAL SWEATER. The shoulders are stitched together, both arms are attached, and the cuffs are finished. (Note that all of these are construction details that will be addressed in future posts.)

Ty Cobb Sweater reproduction, now fully armed!

I've tried the sweater on and discovered that

1. it's absolutely as heavy as you'd expect, 
2. Ty Cobb was bigger than me, though not by much, and 
3. I now understand why the only picture we have shows him wearing it with the sleeves rolled up. Man, those cuffs are long! 

Ty Cobb in the original sweater. Note the rolled-up sleeves.

As you can probably guess, construction is getting into the home stretch. All I have left are the pockets, the button placket, and the Tigers logo. Unfortunately, as with any home stretch, those are the most difficult parts. In other words, the next work-in-progress update is unlikely to be as dramatic as this one. On the other hand, solving the hardest problems always provides a great deal more satisfaction, so you're likely to see me showing off even tiny details. It comes with the territory, I suppose.

The Learning Curve: Building the Armor

[Author's note: From this point forward, there will be a lot of comparison pics between the original Ty Cobb Sweater and my reproduction. Despite my best efforts, the sweaters appear to be radically different colors. This is purely an effect of the lighting, as I use LED bulbs in my home. Both sweaters are, in fact, light grey and as close a color match as I was able to come up with.]

Podcast on "Charity Crafting"

I'm always amazed at serendipitous coincidences, when things come together exactly when you need them to and in exactly the right order. In this case, shortly after my second Hall of Fame visit, I was invited to do a podcast with Knit Picks about "Charity Crafting." (Here's the iTunes link; it's Episode 252 and my segment starts at 25:45.) While the podcast focused mostly on my baseball yarn projects (See? Even then, I was tearing apart baseballs.), that interview made me realize that, since the Ty Cobb and ECL Sweaters would ultimately be donated to charities--both the Hall of Fame and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum are 501c(3)s--maybe Knit Picks would be willing to donate the yarn. At least it couldn't hurt to ask...

So I asked.

To my astonishment and delight, Knit Picks was entirely onboard, even to the point of shipping me the yarn at various points along the road trip I was then taking. (I honestly can't say enough good stuff about them and their enthusiastic involvement. Talk about a business run by good people!)

So there I was, with more pictures, more measurements, a better "feel" for the sweaters, and more than enough yarn...and I still couldn't get the stitches right; I certainly couldn't produce something with that "armor-like" weight.

A partially-unlaced baseball. Note the double-stranding.

And then I had one of those "aha!" moments. Interestingly enough, the idea came from the baseballs I had been unlacing for my baseball yarn projects. I noticed that, to strengthen them, each seam was stitched using TWO laces, not one. While the analogy wasn't perfect--I needed heavier stitches, not stronger ones--using two strands was certainly a straightforward way to mimic thicker yarn, and at the very least, I knew I needed that.

Single-strand stitches

Stitches from the original Ty Cobb Sweater

So I tried it...and miracle of miracles, I'd hit on the solution! Not only did two strands give me the correct gauge, but the stitches were wider-looking and denser. Even better, the fabric was heavy--as in armor-heavy. As far as I can tell, the reason you get heavier fabric is that you're sort of squeezing two stitches into the space normally taken up by one. I'll admit that I don't entirely understand why it works that way, but the point it that it does work, so who am I to question?

Double-strand stitches

Finally, I was in a position to start making the actual reproduction. (Yippee!) So I cast on and got to work. I quickly discovered that knitting armor is HARD. Not only are the individual stitches tighter, but the project itself quickly becomes heavy, meaning your hands and forearms get fatigued and sore. That's probably part of why I haven't been putting as much time as I should into the Ty Cobb and the ECL Sweaters. I like not having arthritis, and I'd prefer to keep it that way. :)

Fortunately, dedication (plus Advil) is now winning out, and even as I write, the second sleeve on the Ty Cobb Sweater is nearly finished. I'll put up more "in-progress pics" soon, but the next few posts will focus on construction details. They're things I find fascinating, and hopefully you will too, if only because we simply don't make clothing this way anymore. Think of it as baseball, knitting, and history, all rolled into one.

The Learning Curve: Reexamining the Data

(Back to baseball sweaters! Where did I leave this? Oh, right...)

Front entrance to the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

So, it was back to Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame. Fortunately, this time I felt more prepared. After all, on my previous visit, I hadn't known about the Ty Cobb Sweater; there had just been a vague idea of, "Maybe we have something in the vaults you'd like to try your hand at."

Measuring the logo (again)

Once again, the Ty Cobb Sweater came out, and not only did I take more pictures and notes, but this time I focused on minutiae in a way that didn't occur to me before. For instance, I took almost ridiculously-detailed measurements on the felt logo, something I had overlooked the first time. In response to a number of interesting Twitter discussions with Baseball by BSmile, Phil Hecken, Paul Lukas etc.--I also made a point of finding out the manufacturer.

More than that, though, I got a feel for the sweater. Put bluntly, it was heavy. Not just "warm-heavy"; it weighed a lot--far more than any modern sweater. As Tom Shieber described it, "The thing is like armor." That fact (as I'll discuss in my next post) turned out to be the key to solving my construction problems.

1914 White Sox sweater

However, this visit turned out to include a lot more than just the Ty Cobb Sweater. Now that we had established that I was trying to make a stitch-for-stitch reproduction, Tom surprised me with yet MORE sweaters! It turns out that the Hall of Fame has a number in its collection (at least eight or nine), and he thought that, once I'd finished with my current project, I might want to try my hand at others.

1918 Red Sox sweater

1934 New York Giants sweater

New York Yankees sweater (circa 1918-1929)

We looked at sweaters from four different teams--the Chicago White Sox, the Boston Red Sox, the New York Giants, and the New York Yankees. As each really deserves its own blog post, I won't go into detail about them here, save to say that the White Sox sweater was from 1914 and was owned by Red Faber, the Red Sox sweater was from 1918 and was owned by Harry Hooper, the New York Giants sweater was from 1934 and was owned by Bill Terry, and the New York Yankees sweater dated to 1918-1929 and was owned by Miller Huggins. (Note: I believe Miller Huggins has more than one sweater in the collection. Apparently, he was quite good about taking care of them.)

I will add that, while all had similar construction, none were identical (i.e. I couldn't use the Ty Cobb Sweater as a template for, say, the Red Sox sweater.) Granted, the fact that the same style dominated for at least twenty years was something of a surprise; I certainly couldn't have identified them in chronological order. (I wonder when the styling changed and why? Topic for a later post, I guess.)

Anyway, I returned from that visit with fresh heart. I had new data--which, thank goodness, turned out to be the data I needed--and the promise of future projects. Now, it was back to the drawing board.

From Left Field: Baseball. Knitting. (Just not baseball knitting...)

Since I mentioned in a previous post that I'd keep you apprised on some of my non-baseball-sweater endeavors, here goes:

My article on The Athletic (most popular that day!)

This past week has been a bit intense. On Wednesday, June 6,  The Athletic published my article about that baseball study I mentioned. After taking apart and thoroughly examining 26 baseballs, I found a quantifiable difference between baseballs made in 2014 and in 2016/2017, one that had been overlooked by MLB's Home Run Committee. Specifically, I discovered the laces on the newer balls are 9% thicker, a difference that could very well account for both the 2107 Home Run Surge and the pitcher blister "epidemic" that started in 2016.

Victor Rojas' pregame report

Unfortunately, the original article is behind a paywall (although The Athletic offers a 7-day free trial, if you want to read it), but the study and its findings were picked up by Yahoo Sports, NBC Sports, and the Kyodo News in Japan. Even better, Victor Rojas did a great job of summarizing the study and its implications on the Angels' pregame show this past Sunday.

Not sure what happens now, but it's always cool to make a consequential discovery, especially one that seems to account for otherwise disparate, unexplained issues in baseball. I've been calling it "the batter-fly effect," much to the groans and eye-rolls of the people around me.

So, that's the baseball side.

My "Watch It!" glove pattern (free download)

On the knitting side, Knitty published one of my patterns on Thursday, June 7. My "Watch It!" Gloves are designed to be worn with a smartwatch, and have a snap closure, conductive thread in the fingertips etc. It was a fun pattern to design (though I wouldn't recommend it for beginning knitters...), and it's gotten a really great response.

See? It really does work with a smartwatch!

I actually do have a baseball sweater post primed and ready, but I thought it would be more timely to put this up first. I'll go back to talking about Ty Cobb fashion later this week. Promise.

Watch It! gloves with the flap closed.

The flap covering the opening.

The Learning Curve: Looks Aren't Enough

Most people aren't aware of this, but (incredible though it may seem) the Ty Cobb Sweater project had its beginnings in 2011. That raises the obvious question: "What have you been doing for the last seven years?" My answer is, "Trying to get it right."

The original inspiration (discussed in an earlier post) came from my successful reproduction of Eddie Gaedel's stirrup socks for the Hall of Fame's One for the Books exhibit. Senior curator Tom Shieber invited me to go through the museum's vaults, in order to find another knitted garment I could try my hand at. In the end, we decided on Ty Cobb's sweater.

After taking LOTS of pictures and LOTS of notes, I thought I had more than enough information to create a historically-accurate reproduction. After all, I'd made the Eddie Gaedel socks based on a black-and-white picture--and not even a great picture at that--and a color image of the St. Louis Browns logo.

Never again will I make the mistake of such hubris...

"Standard" knitting gauge of 16 stitches by 22 rows

The first thing I discovered was that it seemed impossible to reproduce the gauge (number of stitches/4" x number of rows/4"). Knitting stitches are generally wider than they are tall, usually with a ratio of between 3 stitches/4 rows (0.75) and 4 stitches/5 rows (0.80). In the case of the Ty Cobb Sweater though, the stitches were unusually wide--specifically, 15 stitches to 22 rows (0.68). Now, that difference may not seem like a lot, but I could not find a way to knit that gauge. I got close--16 stitches to 22 rows (0.73)--but even then, the shape of the stitches was wrong. Despite the almost-comparable gauge, the stitches on the original sweater looked wider. I couldn't explain it, and I couldn't reproduce that shape.

Close-up of gauge from the original Ty Cobb Sweater

Another problem was the density of the stitches. As you can see, the stitches on the original sweater seem "thicker" as well as wider. To reproduce that density, I realized I'd have to resort to pretty bulky yarn. The problem is that truly "bulky-weight" yarn is a fairly modern idea, catering to novice knitters who like big stitches so they can finish projects quickly. Back when the Ty Cobb Sweater was made, the weight (i.e. thickness) range of yarn was much more limited, and all of it was thinner.

So, what to do? I had a difficult gauge with stitches of an impossible shape and a yarn weight that was clearly historically inaccurate. How could I fix all that?

In the end, I didn't. I faked it. Yup. It's hard to admit, but I gave up and figured, "Well, at least I can produce a replica that looks reasonable."  I tracked down bulky yarn, threw out the gauge entirely, and decided to at least reproduce the measurements.

I actually got pretty far along, finishing the body and everything. (In short, I got to the same point as in my previous post.)

First (unsuccessful) attempt at the Ty Cobb Sweater

And then I discovered I'd failed to buy enough yarn...

Well, that did it. I ripped the whole thing out and decided to start over. I also decided that another visit to the Hall of Fame was in order; I needed a second look, and I needed more data. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right, no matter how long it took. (And here we are, seven years later...)