Sorry I haven’t been posting much today, but I’ve been mesmerized by this amazing photo of Derek Jeter all afternoon.

Remember 1997? Bill Clinton had just begun his second term in office, Titanic was a hit at the box office, and the nation’s five most famous shortstops got together to lay around and pose topless—save for five matching gold chains—for a photo spread in Sports Illustrated. The image appears in a Sports Illustrated photo retrospective called “Derek Jeter: Off the Field.” The set is accompanied by a collection of “tips from SI photographers on how to shoot sports.”

But the tips left me searching for answers on how an aspiring sports photographer might recreate this magnificent tableau: Like, when you’re shooting five baseball players at a time, is one of them necessarily going to end up looking a little creepy—in this case, Rey Ordonez? Do you have to provide the chains, or do they just show up wearing them? What is the correct lens to shoot a shortstop beefcake photo? (A friend is betting on a slight fishbowl). How do you convince these guys that this is a good idea? Finally, how can we bring 1997 back?

Newspaper stories from the good old days say the darndest things. So every week on the Sexist, let’s take a ride on journalism’s way-back machine, to a time when descriptors like the following—”big girls and little girls, blonde girls and brunettes, dark-haired blondes, sunset blondes, Rhinegold blonde—blondes of all kind save the prescription pattern”—qualified as college baseball commentary.

This Week in Sexist History:

Good Ol’ Day: June 23, 1909

Dateline: New York, NY

Subject: Reporter at Yale-Harvard rivalry baseball game fluffs up his flowery play-by-play with a rhapsodic account of the glorious array of girls in attendance. Collect one in every ethnicity!

Read More “This Week In Sexist History: Girls, Girls, Girls Edition” »