Why do baseball coached wear uniforms?

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Why do baseball coached wear uniforms?

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The answer, as is so often the case with all of the most wonderfully weird features of our national pastime, dates back to the late 19th century. In baseball's early days, the word "manager" meant something slightly different: It referred to a team's business manager, the person tasked with keeping the books and arranging travel and generally making sure that everything ran smoothly. The person that we think of today as a manager -- i.e., a team's strategic leader, settling on lineups and making pitching changes -- was simply known as the captain.

That captain wore a uniform -- because, by and large, he was a player himself. Initially it was a practical concern: Early teams simply didn't have the resources to think about hiring a separate coach. But as the game became increasingly professionalized (and increasingly specialized), responsibilities of both player and coach grew, and the roles began to differentiate. (According to MLB official historian John Thorn, the word "manager" stopped referring to business managers and started referring to the people making on-field decisions around 1900.)

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