Uni Watch Book Club: Rosenblatt Stadium — Omaha’s Diamond on the Hill

The Pirates’ mustard caps are inaccurate. The eyelets on the caps should not be black. Can’t believe a detail like that could be missed, given that different-colored eyelets on MLB caps are rare.

Replicas of the shades-of-Carolina-blue tequilla sunrise jersey were sold in the Boshamer stadium shop this past season. Beyond my budget, but I was sorely tempted. A real one, worn by BJ Surhoff in his Carolina days, is displayed in the new baseball museum in same stadium.

This is apropos of absolutely nothing in today’s entry, but I was looking through the Dressed to the Nines database today and thinking about a problem that has long vexed me as dedicated uni-watcher: what should constitute a true uniform CHANGE as opposed to just a TWEAK? I wonder this because from time to time I think about creating a database that shows how long the current uniform set of any team has been in use, so I can see, in nice, spreadsheet form, which teams have maintained a singular look the longest.

But it’s the very definition of “singular look” that vexes me. There are times when, of course, there is no doubt a uniform change has taken place. For example, I am a Phillies fan myself, and after the 1991 season they changed from cherry red/,maroon to their current shade, and changed their logo entirely. That’s a change, no doubt about it. I don’t consider the marketing gimmicks of alternate uniforms or caps for this exercise in baseball, as they change with the wind: I only consider the primary home and road sets, with a heavy emphaiss on the home set (but I will consider the road set when it is unclear to me whether enough change has happened to the home set to consider the alteration from one year to the next a “new uniform”; I will explain more about this below). So, the Phillies have made remarkably little change, if any, to the designs of their two primary sets since 1992, so I think of them as having the same uniforms since that time.

Equally, there are times when something is clearly just a tweak: the Orioles playing around with their script from year to year is an example of this.

But the Orioles are a good launching point for explaining where I find the matter much more difficult to assess. The Orioles have really played around with their look over the last 20 years on their home jerseys, using orange lettering for the word mark and black lettering for it at varying points, and using or not using placket lining at different times. Their hats, too, sometimes are all black, and sometimes have an orange brim, and sometimes have a very orinthologically correct bird, and sometimes have one that is slightly more stylized, but is hardly catastrophic in its change. And any one of these things might change from year to year, but rarely do all three change at once. How do you handle “tweaks” that happen by degrees, but, over time, once enough of them have accrued, the uniform at the end of the period you are looking at is suddenly very different from how it started in the beginning?

Let’s take a difficult case, like the New York Mets. I am not even going to get into the whole introduction of black thing from the late 1990s, because a lot of that is what I would consider “alternate” looks, and thus not changes to the primary set. Let’s look back further, to 1981-1983 first, then 1986-1988, then 1992-1993, then 1994-1995. After the 1981 season, the Mets changed their ROAD uniform only, according to the Dressed to the Nines database, to include the now-famous racing stripes. The home uniform remained sans racing stripes for 1982. Then, this look was brought to the home uniform for 1983. Did enough change occur here even to label this a “change,” and if so, exactly when in time should I ascribe it? Part of me feels that the addition of stripes on the shoulders and side panels of a uniform, but no other change to that uniform – same wordmark, same hat – isn’t a dramatic enough of a change for me to consider it a “new uniform” in the strictest sense. If I were to try to trace every change to striping patterns on professional uniforms, I’d be up a creek without a paddle very quickly. However, in the Mets case, these stripes aren’t just accents at the ends of the sleeeves, nor are they relatively thin or unobtrusive to the look: they really change the landscape of that uniform. But they changed the road look in 1982, and then the home uniform in 1983. So should I date that look to 1982, or 1983?

It gets weirder with Mets road uniforms from 1986-1988, as they ran through three different designs in three years, without changing their home look. First, after 1986, they wanted to put their city name, “New York,” on the road uni, as is traditional (the road unis featured the “Mets” wordmark for several years before that). So they went with a script “New York” that seems to vaguely resemble the script used for “Mets.” That lasted only one season, and they switched to a block-lettering look for 1988 on the road unis, still saying “New York.” These are all changes to the road unis, while the home uni, their primary branding device, stayed as it was – so did the Mets really change their uniforms during this period, or not?

Finally, after the 1992 season, the Mets dropped the racing stripes off the home and away uniforms again, and now added a looping underline of the word “Mets” that originated off the end of the “s” and ended back underneath the “M” – similar to the way the “Orioles” script achieves its underlining. They also changed the road uniforms at this time, with a script “New York” again being used, also with an underline. I know Mets fans hated the underline, and it was eliminated after just two seasons, with the road uniform being changed again to essentially the design that remains today for the road grays. When you look at the 1993-1994 uniform, though, the change isn’t really that catasrophic – the same basic look remains. The Mets script is essentially the same, the stripes are gone, but an underline is present. Is that enough of a difference to constitute a change for the purposes of tracking such things in time? How about when the underline was eliminated after 1994, but no stripes were put back? Is just the elimination of the underline enough to say, for the purposes of tracking, that the Mets really changed their brand identity?

There are more subtle examples than the Mets where I find this to be a problem. The Cardinals, after the 1991 season, dropped the elastic waistband pants and pullover jerseys in favor of what is still their primary home uniform. But what they changed, really, were the methods of fastening the pants to the waist, and the shirt to the torso. The essential LOOK of the uniform – the word mark and hat – were basically unchanged. So is this a uniform change or just a “tweak”?

And if it is just a tweak, the Cardinals present other problems, as they were one of these teams that changed uniform designs by degrees, rather than in one swift motion (like the Phillies from 1969 to 1970, and then again from 1991 to 1992). In the 1950s, the Cardinals wore navy caps at home (like the ones they wear on the road now) with white jerseys which had red placket lining. Their iconic wordmark was more or less as it is now. For the 1956 season, they changed their jerseys radically, while keeping the same hat, eliminating the Cardinals sitting on either side of a bat, and changing the script. But that lasted only for 1956; in 1957, the old word mark was back, but now the home jersey had no placket lining, and they still wore a blue cap at home. In 1964, they switched to wearing a red cap at home, and their primary home look has only changed since with respect to the pants going elastic and the shirt going pull-over for awhile, before switching back.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider a hat change with no corresponding shirt change enough to constitute a true “uniform change,” but the navy cap looks a lot different than the cardinal red cap. So when did the Cardinals adopt their current look exactly? When they dropped the placket lining but returned to their great wordmark in 1957? Or when they switched the home cap color to cardinal red in 1964? Or when they switch back to a button-front jersey and belted pants in 1992?

This problem isn’t restricted to just baseball. The Patriots are a vexing example for me. In football, where the helmet is probably just as or more responsible for one’s sense of what a particular team’s uniform is (and thus is more important, in relative terms, than hats to baseball uniforms), when a team retains the same helmet, but makes tweaks or even significant changes to their jerseys, I have a difficult time. The Patriots are the classic example: they definitely re-branded themselves after the 1992 season, to use the “Flying Elvis” look. That was a change. But, a few years later, for the 1999 season, they changed their jerseys to a much darker shade of blue, but left their helmets and wordmark essentially the same, save for darkening the blue up a bit to match the jerseys – is this a true uniform/brand identity change, or just a tweak?

I can give answers, but I won’t feel definitively about them the way I feel about obvious changes or obvious tweaks. It seems to me I am working toward a Potter Stewart definition of when a real uniform change has taken place: I can’t exactly define it, but “I know it when I see it.”

So, what is the threshold at which you all consider a uniform change to have taken place, and not merely a “tweak”? Discuss!

If any of you live in city, state or area of the country that does not have an NFL or MLB franchise, how did you come about to be a fan or whatever particular team you root for?

Did you ever choose a team to root for just because of a uni?

I had plenty of pro teams to root for the in NYC area, but also rooted for/against some college teams strictly because of uni or uni color. I rooted for the tarheels and columbia lions becuase the wore sky/powder blue like my high school…and rooted against any team that wore Navy and Orange ( Syracuse, Auburne etc ) because that was our rival school colors..

But going back to the pros, has anyone ever become a real fan of team, strictly based on its uni. Not because its your hometown or the team was succesful?

Re-reading my own post, part of the problem is the conflation of “brand identity” and “team uniform.” I suppose one might accurately say that the Patriots have retained the same “brand identity” since 1993, but that their UNIFORM changed for 1999. Of course, this make a clear distinction between “brand identity” and “team uniform” that, while perhaps useful for the purposes of this discussion, isn’t really so neat or cut-and-dried. The team uniform is a big part of “brand identity.” Part of what I am asking here, I guess, is what precisely is the relationship between the two?

One other point that I raised in my previous comment, but then never returned to, was how I use road uniforms in helping ot make a determination. Ordinarily, I consider the home uniform of a team its primary identifying vehicle. Thus, changing road uniforms rarely leads to a change in “brand identity,” and thus to “uniforms” in the broadest sense. For example, in 1989, the Phillies switched from a powder blue road uniform to the same design, but with grey as the primary color instead. Obviously, that’s a change, but I wouldn’t say that it was a change to the Phillies essential look – this is place where the difference between “team uniform” and “brand identity” might be very helpfully employed.

On the other hand, when the Mets addded that wordmark underlining in 1993, they also changed their road uniforms at the same time, to correspond to the home look. This strikes me as indicative of an effort by the Mets to re-brand themselves; because the road uniform changed wordmarks to correspond with the underlining added to the home uniform, I am more inclined to call the switch both to and away from those looks as “uniform changes” in the brand identity sense.

Late to the party today, after a quick look through the comments, I don’t see it mentioned, so I’ll ask.

Am I the only one who isn’t able to see Todd’s scans?

Were they taken down over a copyright violation issue or something?

From the “We REALLY Missed This One Coming” in 2011, the West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx have changed their name to the Jackson Generals, a name purloined from the o,ld Mississippi-based team now known as the Corpus Christi Hooks, this according to the link.

link from Monday’s announcement.