Fashion Statement

The Red Sox unveiled new uniforms yesterday.

It's not the first time the team has tweaked their uniforms, although it has been a while.

I'm not usually one to comment on sports fashion - uniforms tend to either be garish (Houston Astros, San Diego Padres of the 1980's, the Denver Nuggets as recently as five years ago, the list goes on and crosses all sports), to sleek and pretty for the sport (the Patriots when they went with the flying Elvii Blues in the 1990's, Jacksonville Jaguars, etc), or just the sort of thing you don't mind getting dirty (Pat Patriot, Steelers, Packers, etc). I'm a bit of a traditionalist.

That said, the primary home uniform for the Sox...well, I like it. It has a throwback feel to it - like turn of last century throwback.

However, the away blues and the alternate home uni look like Spring Training jerseys.

Don't like 'em.

If they win in them, I won't really give a rat's ass, but my initial reaction is that the team shouldn't be playing their regular season games in what look to be Spring Training uniforms.

Winning absolves a lot of sins - the least of which, in my head, are fashion faux pas.

Castaways...

The Patriots are facing the woeful Raiders this weekend. It could very well be a trap game - the game against a depleted Seattle team almost was.

Consider, for the Seattle game, Richard Seymour was pretty quiet against a back-up left tackle, and Seneca Wallace looked like he didn't come into the game with a career 1-3 record as a starter.

But now the team goes to face another team at the bottom of its division in the 3-10 Raiders. They bring with them Raiders castaways Lamont Jordan and Randy Moss.

Funny thing about the majority of the free agents and other acquisitions (trades) the Patriots have had the last couple of years. There are a lot of players that have been castaways, cast-offs of other teams. Outside of Adalius Thomas, however, most have been taken off the scrap heaps of some sub-standard teams - Jordan and Moss from the bottom feeding Raiders; Wes Welker, Heath Evans, Billy Yates, and Sammy Morris from sub-.500 Dolphins (and in the case of Morris, Bills) teams; Rosey Colvin, cut from the Houston Texans who also once had Jabar Gaffney; Sam Aiken from the Bills; Kelley Washington, and Deltha O'Neal from the Bengals; Lewis Sanders from last season's attrocious Falcons team.

That list is comprised of 12 individuals that played on losing teams before coming to the Pats. It doesn't include any players on injured reserve, nor does it include players like Juniour Seau, or (the injured) Rodney Harrison, or Mike Vrabel, among others, who were all cast-offs from winning teams - teams that thought these players would not fit into their long term plans because they were either too old to contribute, or (it was believed they) just weren't good enough to crack the starting line-up.

That's a lot of other teams' trash - particularly that of losing teams - that seem to be performing better than what those teams expected of them.