Good Legs and Guts
In 1971, baseball joined the rest of the country and put on the shortest short-shorts it could find
One of the nice things about baseball stories is that sometimes they are the drink and sometimes they are the glass.
This is an example of the latter, a story from the summer when the game’s promotional “experts” hopped on the world’s latest fashion craze.
Charlie O. Finley, owner of the Athletics from 1960 to 1980, was not much of a leader of men (many of his players hated him), but he was a creative and motivated promoter. The rolls of Finley stunts are filled with all-timers, including the mule he made team mascot and named after himself, for no reason other than a fondness for mules. He designed new uniforms for the Oakland A’s based on his own favorite colors, building a palate that started as ugly and became iconic, leading to many of the modern-day color schemes in baseball, for better or worse.
There were giveaway days, too, all the usual cheaply-made souvenirs and paraphernalia, but also events a bit further afield, such as Farmer’s Day, when Finley invited fans to chase after greased pigs to win a season ticket and gave away bales of hay, crates of oranges, and the captured pigs themselves. Such was his reputation that most crazy stunts in baseball were reflexively attributed to Finley.
In 1971, during a segment on a new fashion fad, a radio personality in faraway Milwaukee half-suggested and half-dared the Athletics’ fearless and shameless owner to throw a “Hot Pants Day” promotion at his ballpark. Finley, who never abandoned his downtown Chicago offices despite moving his team to the California coast, got the message.
And so it was that June 27, 1971, became Hot Pants Day at the Oakland Coliseum. The A’s would play a double-header that day against the Kansas City Royals. Summer double-headers by themselves provided good returns, but many teams used promotions to further supercharge the gate on such days, giving fans two games for the price of one and a sideshow in between.
This double-header also featured a ceremony beforehand. Oakland pitching phenom Vida Blue would receive a baby blue Cadillac convertible with “BLUE” license plates. Blue was drawing slightly over the minimum salary of $12,750, but after winning ten straight games in his first full season, Finley offered the car, marking perhaps the high point in his torturous relationship with Blue.
The mid-day sideshow, “Hot Pants Day” would be a contest, of sorts. All ladies (and only ladies, the fine print made clear) who came to the ballpark wearing a pair of “hot pants” would be invited onto the field in between games for a judging contest, showing off their attire and competing for prizes across a number of dubious categories. Each contestant would receive two free tickets to a future double-header.
Finley, who acted as the team’s general manager and promotional manager among other duties, guesstimated 1,000 women would enter the contest and distributed 2,000 tickets for lower-level staffers to hand out on the diamond. Then, after the public address announcer invited participants to come forward, over 6,000 women of all ages, shapes, and sizes made their way through the open gates and onto the field, every one of them wearing hot pants.
The tickets quickly ran out, but no one seemed to mind too much. Meanwhile, the Oakland Raiders (football) and Oakland Seals (hockey) players lined up as event judges were rather overwhelmed. “We just never expected so many,” Finley said gleefully.
Reggie Jackson, Oakland’s talented right fielder, had hoped to take in the judging from the field level, but the swarms of appreciative fans forced him to beat a hasty retreat to the dugout, where he was photographed perched on the roof, legs dangling over the edge, gazing out over what Finley had wrought.
Light “gleamed off of hundreds of pairs of binoculars” and there were “minor scraps and much unfeminine shoving” as contestants strove to be noticed by the judges, who were mostly trying not to be trampled. A few motivated participants engaged in some above-and-beyond nudity, but their efforts mostly got lost in the huge crowd. Eventually a group of finalists won something called “Hot Pants Cologne.”
The 45-minute contest dragged on past an hour, the horde of contestants trampling the field. The festivities ended when “a groundskeeper turned a hose on the crowd. The effect was like rain in a forest–until a Coliseum security official ordered the hose extinguished.”
Over 45,000 fans came to the Coliseum for Hot Pants Day, contributing to what would become the A’s biggest box office weekend ever. Perhaps the most impressive statistic: the 6,000 who chose to participate in the contest were only half of the women who’d taken advantage of the promotion to wear short shorts and get in for free. Over a quarter of the crowd owned at least one pair of hot pants.
Hot Pants Day immediately became renowned as one of Finley’s Great Labors and seized the imagination of other promotionally-minded organizations across baseball. Finley was hailed as the mastermind who dared to grab onto a ladies’ fashion trend and take away a king’s ransom in tickets. He didn’t even have to give away the hot pants, people just brought their own. It was a coup.
But, if you are like us, we are probably long past the point in this story where you thought: “What were hot pants?” We’ll explain.
First mentioned as they appeared on designer runways in the autumn of 1970, hot pants were described as pairs of “tiny trousers in soft, fluttery fabrics, recalling those worn by calendar pinup girls in the 1940s.”
Hot pants (or hotpants, up to you) soon appeared in ready-to-wear design collections across Europe and New York, previewing the “trends” the coming year would bring (i.e. trends which the designers meant to start). “It will take a woman with a lot of aplomb to wear them,” said one fashion writer. “But they provide an alternative for those who are nostalgic about showing a leg.”
The fashion industrial complex did its thing and by February of 1971, hot pants were selling, mostly to an under-30 crowd. They sold “madly” in Boston at Lord & Taylor and “fantastically” in New York at Bergdorf Goodman, which could not keep them in stock. Prices ranged from $14 to $25.
One Chicago marketer declared that hot pants had “no psychosocial acceptance,” and predicted the trend would not take off. The trend then took off.
By April, newspapers and magazines were explaining hot pants to their fashion-conscious readers. “The first good news for teenagers since blue jeans,” the Chicago Tribune announced, “the short, shorter and shortest of pants, the boomerang of the midi-skirt for girls not interested in cover-up fashion.” The Tribune’s fashion writers recommended pairing them with “pantyhose, to tone down the nudity and flatter the leg,” and avoid brightly-colored boots, lest one inadvertently evoke the passe “boots-made-for-walking” look of the long-gone 1960s.
The trend was as hot in Europe as it was in the United States. The United Kingdom’s Princess Anne, then 20 years old, found herself in a bind as she was squarely in the target demographic for hot pants but also second in line to the British throne. She chose a side. “That’s the limit, the absolute limit,” the Princess Royal said of hot pants. “Certain things I will not do.”
“They’re really fun to wear, but I don’t see them for the office,” one fashion house insider had said that winter. But by the end of April, “female executives with good legs and guts” were among the first workers to show up at the office in hot pants, the Tribune reported.
One survey of “10 of the nation’s largest corporations” revealed that seven of them already adapted dress codes to permit hot pants. Would many fashion-forward women take advantage of such policies? Company executives weren’t sure. One executive, an “honest, unliberated male,” said only “I dread the summer.”
Soon, hot pants were everywhere, including 30,000 feet above the country. Northeastern Airlines filled newspapers with ads promoting a new look and attitude: “We’re making things prettier, brighter. To reflect our happy bird’s-eye view of life. And wait ‘til you see the new hot pants uniforms our stewardesses are wearing.”
Another “tiny Texas airline” made hot pants a part of their big 1971 rebrand under a new name: Southwest Airlines. It certainly didn’t end up hurting them.
Bars, nightclubs, discotheques, and other nightlife-oriented venues were all-in, of course, hosting “Hot Pants” themed nights almost as soon as the garment appeared in stores, offering women free or reduced admission if they came wearing the smallest and dressiest shorts they owned.
Which (almost) brings us back to Charlie Finley. We have just a few stops to make first, however, because despite the credit given to Oakland’s owner as the Father of Hot Pants (Day), Finley was not the first promoter to bring hot pants into sports, or even the first in baseball.
The first “major” Hot Pants-themed sporting event was probably a “Harlem Hot Pants Night” held at Madison Square Garden on April 25, 1971. John F.X. Condon, a “slender, chain-smoking Irishman from New York’s tough Yorkville section,” worked as the Garden’s boxing event promoter, and he decided to see if the new fad could spice up an otherwise unremarkable middleweight contest. It was a “Harlem” event because that was where most of the usual crowd for such fights already came from.
Condon was also a little ahead of his time in that female patrons would not be the only ones sporting hot pants at his event. “Both fighters will wear extra-short shorts and sleeveless shirts,” he promised. As a sweetener, Condon announced that heavyweight champion Joe Frazier would also be at the Garden, but not to box—he would play music with his band, the Knockouts. “Baseball will have ‘bat days’ and give you a baseball bat,” Condon bragged. “I do better–I give people a fighter.”
At last, back to baseball, but not Oakland. Buried in a preview of upcoming promotions at Atlanta Stadium, the Memphis Press-Scimitar mentioned that the Braves planned an upcoming event combining a pre-planned “College Night” with an new flourish, a “Ladies Hot Pants Night.” The Braves planned to release this promotional manticore on Monday, May 17.
Atlanta’s LHPN passed with little fanfare, but it did happen—on a warm, muggy night in Atlanta, when 16,000 people saw a Braves’ 4-3 extra-inning victory over Tom Seaver and the New York Mets. The evening also featured “a pre-game contest staged on the roof of the Braves dugout,” featuring ladies in hot pants. Between the thrilling win, the “blondes, brunettes, and redheads and a few brawls in the stands,” it was a perfect night of baseball, one writer declared. That seemed about the extent of the coverage devoted to the promotion–it may be that the Atlanta marketing team’s heart wasn’t in it enough to really spread the word. It would take Charlie Finley and his signature commitment to a bit to make hot pants “baseball famous,” nearly a month later.
Even minor league baseball beat Finley to the act. The Texas League Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs held their Hot Pants Night a week before Oakland did, admitting ladies free for wearing “hot pants, short-shorts, or the new Coca Cola beach pants.”1 Prizes included gift certificates and a Polaroid camera. 5,600 fans showed up.
And then came Finley’s Oakland event, not the first but—by far—the most successful. Or the timeliest, at least, coinciding with the uppermost crest of the fad. Either way, he got the credit, such as it was. “Finley was the first man to have a Hot Pants Night,” went a typical account from 1972, describing the owner’s promotional ingenuity. That was wrong, but it certainly seemed right. For some strange reason, no one from the Braves’ organization bothered to correct the record.
Novel or not, something struck a nerve in Oakland on that weekend in late June, signaling other teams (who may have been on the fence about the good taste of such a promotion) that this was truly what the people wanted.
Hot Pants Day at the Coliseum inspired baseball’s more financially-distressed and less-principled organizations, none more so than the Washington Senators. The Senators’ owner, Bob Short, was the poor man’s Charlie Finley—in that he had virtually the same irascible, huckstering personality but was rather less rich.
In 1971, Short was in the final stage of a years-long grift, preparing to abscond with Washington’s baseball team for a fertile major-league market in Dallas-Fort Worth. To make his heist palatable to the rest of the league owners, Short had spent several years demonstrating, as expressively as possible, that after successfully hosting one Senators team or another for sixty years, Washington’s fans would no longer support D.C. baseball.
“We’ve given away free trips to Honolulu, new cars, pantyhose, helmets, T-shirts, caps, banners, pennants, copper bracelets, lapel flags, and Frank Howard batting gloves trying to get people in our ballpark,” Short complained that July to a gaggle of writers. “I’ve done anything I thought would help. Somebody even suggested our ball club go out there and play a game topless.”
“You wouldn’t do that…would you?” a reporter asked, sounding less sure with each of the six words of the question.
“No, I would never do anything that’s not dignified,” Short promised. “We still have some promotions we haven’t tried. Like Hot Pants Night. Finley tried it and drew 44,000 people in Oakland. It ought to go great in Washington.“ The profound dignity of Hot Pants Night had captured Bob Short’s imagination and would live there rent-free for several years.
Harry Caray, the great broadcaster of the people, was interested. Women in hot pants were already ubiquitous around his posting in the bleachers of Chicago’s Comiskey Park. “I think we should have a hot pants night here, what do you think, guys?” he asked the crowd in mid-July. The crowd said aye, but the White Sox administration said nay. A new owner would arrive in 1975, however, and he would prove significantly more amenable.
On July 23, Cleveland held their own Hot Pants Night at Municipal Stadium, attracting a sizable crowd of 22,000 people and otherwise passing without apparent incident.
The Houston Astros’ version of the event drew a “disappointing crowd” of 7,500 fans to the Astrodome. This iteration featured what might have been the best prize—a trip to Acapulco—and the best actual-baseball event when the Astros won with help from an inside-the-park grand slam by Cesar Cedeno. “The cheapest grand slam I’ve seen,” groused the Dodgers’ manager, Walter Alston, after defensive miscues by Jim Lefebvre and, gulp, Bill Buckner made it possible.
The minor leagues took their turns as well. One particularly ill-advised version was held by the California League Modesto Reds, who decided to combine a “dime beer night” with a hot pants competition and ended up with a pretty good approximation of Sodom and Gomorrah in the good old days.
The International League Rochester Red Wings’ Hot Pants event in July did particular societal damage, featured in an extensive write-up in the local paper that began by asking “Will hot pants send women’s liberation up in smoke?” and featuring one participant who “mourned the passing of the ‘old-fashioned whistle.’” (“You don’t see too many men do it anymore.”)
The Red Wings put a particularly queasy promotional twist into the basic formula by awarding as prizes three dates with (presumably single) members of the team.
The Rochester account is on the rougher end, but in general, reading coverage of Hot Pants Nights in 2024 leaves one in urgent need of a walk and some fresh air. Perhaps this is no surprise, given the primary writers in this particular corner of history were generally not interested in or equipped to use the sports pages to discuss what such promotions might say about society’s pervasive objectification of women’s bodies.
Any such concerns, if acknowledged at all, were quickly labeled as the sour grapes of the radical minority of “Women’s Lib,” which period sports writers (and a large portion of the population) used as a catch-all disposal for any viewpoint that questioned whether something men found enjoyable could nonetheless be bad for women, individually or collectively. Waving all that stuff away, the men on the sports beats enjoyed the novelty that Hot Pants Night brought to their often rote and repetitive work.
The least offensive accounts of Hot Pants events at ballparks described them as uncomplicated fun for all concerned—the women who paraded around on the field and the largely-male crowds who passed judgment on them like Romans in the Coliseum. And, we must say, there certainly was a good bit of fun happening. Newspapers ran more pictures than usual from these events (shocking, we know), many of them candid shots of the crowds, and the groups of women captured in these images seemed to be having a fine time indeed, and we don’t want to discount that.
Moving down the journalistic continuum, we find accounts that were remarkably creative in finding ways to make these events about men, such as a Kansas City reporter’s declaration that Hot Pants Night was a fine exercise in “girl-watching,” a pastime the writer declared every bit as American as baseball itself.
At the bottom of the barrel of Hot Pants coverage were any number of chauvinistic “takes” so glowingly radioactive that we ourselves are setting off a Geiger counter after reading them fifty years later. We’ll spare you.
Not until Washington D.C. brought Bob Short’s latest promotional fantasy to life did any of the sporting press really begin to contend with Hot Pants Night’s evident problems. And his is not a perfect account by any means, but we must give Washington Post staff writer B.D. Colen credit for asking complicating questions and at least acknowledging the existence of those who didn’t see Hot Pants competitions as right up there with Babe Ruth, fireworks, and apple pie.
On August 8, 1971, 4,300 women “willing to be laughed at, booed, ogled, taunted, and praised” were given free admission to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Stadium, where the Senators would play the Cleveland Indians. 18,200 fans attended overall, which was no doubt a disappointment to Bob Short, who’d dreamed of Oakland numbers. At least the price of throwing it was right, as Finley had earlier pointed out.
Colen asked Short to explain the promotion, which the owner did with characteristically blunt verbal instruments. “The idea for a hot pants day and contest is like anything else—a ball day, a bat day, a helmet day,” Short said, not appreciating that he had just added half of humanity to a list of promotional objects otherwise so basic that none of them had as much as a moving part.
The on-field parade of contestants elicited cheers, calls, and boos from boys and men hanging over the railing edges to watch the procession, Colen said. The grand prize winner received a $500 scholarship to the Cappa Chell Modeling School.
Colen was rare among period sportswriters in acknowledging the dozen “women’s liberation supporters” keeping a forlorn vigil outside RFK Stadium, handing out educational literature to any interested in taking it. Colen did not give column space to quotes from any of those dissenters, but he went further than anyone when he quoted their “radical” literature, which described Hot Pants Night as “meat for men’s sexual fantasies” and decried the way the contest categorized women by age, size, and attractiveness as “treating women as objects.”
Colen even brought these concerns up with Bob Short, perhaps the person in the stadium least-equipped to grapple with them. Short responded with a rhetorical shrug. “Women are objects to men and men are objects to women,” he declared, an answer demonstrating that every person, regardless of sex or gender, was an object to Bob Short.
Next Colen asked some of the contestants about the dissenting views. In response, a 19-year old, who finished as a finalist in the “prettiest” category said she was so annoyed with “the women’s lib people” she “felt like burning their handouts,” though she did admit the contest seemed “a bit like a dog show” in structure.
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” another contestant said, while declining to give her real name.
Even once safely in Texas, his Senators now rechristened as the Rangers, Short’s attendance problems followed him, as did his hope that women in hot pants could be his salvation.
Between June and August of 1972, the Rangers, in last place all the while, held three different Hot Pants promotions at Turnpike Stadium in Arlington2. Attendance ranged from 6,000 to 9,000 and at at least one of the events the Rangers were forced to also give out 6,000 little league bats so fans could add noise to the largely-empty stadium.
Bob Short would be out of baseball before he could learn that the best way to draw crowds to baseball games was to field competitive, winning teams. Even Charlie Finley had figured that out. The real trick, in Finley’s mind, was to field good teams without paying the players.
Later in 1972, the Rochester Red Wings also decided to have another go at Hot Pants Night, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, perhaps attempting to make up for their rather grotesque coverage from the year before, published a dissenting view in their letters column, written by a real, actual woman.
Barbara Dell Hall brought the rain, calling Hot Pants Night “a chauvinistic promotion measure” and condemning “the use of women as sure-fire gimmicks to boost attendance.”
Hall also criticized the Red Wings’ recent decision to employ two women as base-sweeping “broom girls” and put them in hot pants and boots, too.
“Women have not successfully broken into the professional sports business but rather they will sweep the bases and the feet of male players. If a sweeping attendant is a necessary safety measure, then why not employ a capable person regardless of sex?”
“Again, I ask my sisters in Rochester to open their eyes.”
Of course, no demographic is a monolith. A response from one of Ms. Hall’s “sisters” appeared in the same space a few weeks later:
“In response to the letter by Barbara Dell Hall, I say: ‘Sounds like Women’s Lib!’ If Women’s Lib is so great, get your own baseball team out to Silver Stadium.”
And so on.
Since they first hit the runway, fashion writers, who were mostly women at that time, held that hot pants were nothing but a particularly transparent and cynical attempt to start a trend. They were, as Grace Hechinger wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “a rebound appealing only to the ultra-young,” and “fad rather than fashion.”
All the contradictory trends pushed out onto women reflected the chaos of modern life, the New York Times wrote, “with its lack of consensus about what is acceptable and with the substitution of synthetic, commercial creations for leadership in taste.”
“The alleged ‘freedom’ of anything-goes fashion,” Hechinger went on, “seems not so much a victory of Women’s Lib as the simple consequence of a creatively-bankrupt fashion industry. When the rapid succession of hot new items equally quickly turns stale, potential shoppers become suspicious and close their purses.”
Women certainly didn’t throw their hot pants out after 1971, and short shorts remain with us to this day, but the national culture at large did close its purse. No major league team other than the Rangers put on a Hot Pants Night in 1972, and references to any such events in any forum seemed to recycle down by half each year after, from thousands to hundreds to just dozens by the middle of the decade.
So, what were these events, while they lasted?
Cynical cash grabs?
A recognition of women who felt increasing agency to wear what they wanted and show what they wanted and feel good about all of that?
A process of systematized objectification under a male gaze that, in 1971, burned as hot and bright as the eye of Sauron?
The best answer we can provide, from our extremely-limited vantage here at Project 3.18?
“Yes.”
In lieu of a better answer, we will offer one more story from Hot Pants Night that at least kind of satisfies the Bechdel-Wallace test and is therefore a good place for us to conclude.
On September 13, 1971, Kansas City put on what seems to have been the last Hot Pants Night of the season.
“Beauty in Hot Pants Night” was fittingly held with the Oakland A’s in town. Avoiding the biggest pitfall of the Oakland event, preliminary “judging” was held as ladies entered the ballpark, to avoid a large crowd out on the field. This ended up not being a major concern, as of the 12,600 in attendance, only about 400 women were admitted for free on the basis of revealing attire, the fad already evidently losing steam. The male judges, including a city councilman, invited about 50% of the eligible women to participate in a semifinal round out on the field and made de rigueur smirking comments about how great this all was.
The contestants who’d made the first cut were mostly in their “late teens and early 20s,” the Kansas City Times reporter wrote, and they “disproved a popular theory that in any large gathering of women, at least two will be wearing the same outfit.” Har har.
“Some outfits had the look of expensive boutiques, others were of the homemade variety with cut-off blue jeans and slacks. Colors ranged from day-glo pink and purple to the dark browns of leather and suede to red, white, and blue combinations.”
The players were particularly impressed by one contestant who’d managed to put on a very small pair of shorts despite the large cast she had one one leg. A finalist, she gamely took to the field on crutches.
The crowd would choose (via applause) a first and second place winner out of a pool of twenty finalists. Before final judging, however, the finalists were joined by “Mrs. Ewing M. Kauffman,” who in the liberated 21st century we would identify as “Muriel Kauffman.”
Mrs. Kauffman, along with her husband, owned the Kansas City Royals. She was 55 years old in 1971, placing her decidedly out of the “target” market for hot pants but very much in the demographic that these baseball promotional contests often included for purposes of mockery. Perhaps it was wise, then, that Mrs. Kauffman emerged from the dugout in a white, floor-length dress, radiating dignity and Midwestern sensibility.
She moved lightly, almost regally towards the crowd of scantily-clad younger women gathered at home plate, greeting and warmly congratulating each one. And then, in a whirl and a flourish, the team’s co-owner tore away her skirt to unveil the pair of white hot pants she wore underneath.
She was not an official contestant, but Muriel Kauffman received the loudest and sincerest cheers of the evening.
If you attended a “hot pants” related event in the early 1970s, we’d love to hear from you. Add a comment to our story here or send us an email at project318@substack.com.
If you weren’t around in those years, maybe you have a relative who was. Ask them about hot pants, and you’re welcome in advance for the rewarding and not-at-all-awkward conversation that will surely ensue!
Tomorrow we’ll bring you our third (and last) story of this very special week, centered on a minor scuffle between Pete Rose and a controversial umpire in 1988 and the questions of responsibility and accountability the fight sparked.
Tomorrow: “65 Seconds; Part 1”
We are curious about that last option, but we also recognize we’ve already pushed it here in terms of fashion history. So, please feel free to research “Coca Cola beach pants” and let us know what you find.
Great minds think alike: As we were finalizing this piece for publication, a colleague reached out to us. He had no idea we were working on a Hot Pants Night story. “Hey,” he wrote, “have you heard about this weird promotion the Rangers did in the '70s? Take a look.” It was a short video clip from the Rangers’ first Hot Pants Night, in 1972, featuring some high hair and revealing contestant interviews. If you’ve read this far (really, thank you), you’re going to want to give this a watch.
Fantastic post! Oh my. The good old days. In 1971, when I was 15, I saved money from my after school/Saturday job to buy a pair of powder blue corduroy shorts - I hated the term hot pants even then - with pink patch pockets. I also spent my money on a subscription to Ms. magazine, still quite young in 1971. I hated being whistled at but I wanted to wear what I chose. Never heard of these contests because we didn’t live in the continental U.S.
I can't get enough of this outside-the-lines history of our once and future national pastime. Keep up the great work, Paul.