Article: While MLB's Embrace of Fanatics is Bad, These New Uniforms Might Be Good

[Matthew Trueblood]

It's the talk of spring camps throughout MLB. Fans hate the new official jerseys being made for MLB by Fanatics, despite the imprimatur of Nike. The players, if possible, hate them even more. What if both groups are just plain wrong?

Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports

I have to lead with a confession, here: I have never bought a baseball jersey. I doubt that will ever change. I used to buy player t-shirts (shirseys), but I even stopped that about a decade ago. I don't want to tell fans or players how to react to the look of a uniform, or certainly about the feel of one, because I don't engage with those products directly, and I'm not someone who cares overmuch about the uniforms. They could play in batting practice gear, including shorts and performance tights, and I'd be fine with it. Some folks obsess over the details of these things, and I think that's fine, but I leave it to them to do.

Here's what I think does need to be said, though: All people fear and hate most change, but baseball's players and fans fear and hate it more than most, and I'm not sure that's justified--in general, or in this specific instance. One thing I have thought a lot about over the years, aesthetically, is how the game has been and will continue to be changed by the ways in which we observe and consume it. One of the most important ways in which our consumption of the game has changed is that we watch it on TV more than we watch it in person. Another is that, when we watch it in person, it's in much, much higher definition than it used to be.

Once picture quality improved to the point where every fan could clearly see every bad call, the game had to adopt new rules and practices to ensure that it maintained its integrity and legitimacy. Umpires started being systematically evaluated by technology (remember QuesTec?) over two decade ago, and it's not a coincidence that that happened at the same time as HD technology hit the home TV market. When we took another leap beyond the original version of HD and into the age of digital video (that could also be captured and shared on the internet with high resolution), instant replay came into the game.

Uniforms have already changed over time, because the quality of the video feeds we use to watch games has improved so vastly. Logos on caps and batting helmets have shrunk, because you don't need them to be as big as you used to need them to be in order to instantly identify a team when you alight on Sunday Night Baseball by coincidence.

Go back and look at a picture of Johnny Bench from half a century ago, and his name was plastered across his broad back in roughly 360-point font, because they wanted you to be able to see that that was Johnny Bench, even if you were watching from the upper deck or on a 13-inch black-and-white TV in Oklahoma. Compare pictures of Michael Jordan from early in his career (tall, plain white letters across the red of his road Bulls jersey) and from the end of if (smaller font, a slightly greater arc to them, black letters with white outlines. The Bulls knew most of Jordan's audience, by the mid-1990s, was not in the building. It was tuning in to the NBA on NBC, and it could see his name just fine without an aid that risked gaudiness.

I, once again, don't really care about the slight arc in the lettering of names and the smaller size of the lettering on players' backs with the new jerseys. It's been one of the fans' and players' sticking points, though, and I will say that I don't view that as inherently cheap-looking, as many have called them. That seems to me to be a sense gleaned from years of unofficial replica jerseys having smaller lettering than official ones, but again, the official ones probably had bigger ones than they wanted to for some portion of that time. In five years, if there's no further change, we might well wonder why names weren't always thus rendered on players' backs.

Another notable change, for teams (like the Cubs) who have pinstriped uniforms, is that those pinstripes seem to be closer together (and thus, there are more of them) than in the past.

Here's a screenshot from this morning at the Cubs shop showing last year's PCA jersey and this year's, as well as last year and this year's Retired Player option pic.twitter.com/umyiKwikPN

— Infield Fly Girl (@infieldflygrl) February 17, 2024

Again, one way to choose to see that is that it's cheap, or weird, or betrays an inattention to detail. I don't want to rule out that last part, because Fanatics, the company with whom MLB and Nike partnered for these, is infamous for that issue. The MLB logo on players'  backs no longer aligns perfectly with the pinstripes, which is an unforced error that does catch the eye all wrong, so there are clear and obvious fixes needed here. Still, ultimately, more pinstripes is the kind of sartorial choice that couldn't have been made by the Yankees, Phillies, Cubs, or others until about 15 years ago, because they would have looked bad on TV. With better-quality video, more stripes are possible, and they might even look good.

I don't mean to imply that there aren't any good reasons to be upset or suspicious about this set of changes. To whatever extent producing uniforms and fan merchandise this way is cheaper than by going the previous routes, I have no trouble believing that MLB chose that lower expense and higher profit margin over optimal fan service and player comfort. I don't trust MLB, Nike, or Fanatics at all, because they're all large companies with long histories of cutting corners to ensure profits, at the expense of all other considerations. 

I do, however, broadly urge everyone (including MLB players, if it comes to it) to be a bit more patient with the rollout of low-stakes change. The uniforms to which we're accustomed, in sports, seem like strokes of brilliant design genius handed down from sages of ages past, but the reality is that they're all the result of commercially-motivated, iterative change over decades, and the latest iteration in that process might turn out to be a bit better-suited to our times and to the broader evolution of the game than you would first think.

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Do you share in the general detestation of the new uniforms throughout the league? Is this an issue about which you care deeply? Will these changes affect your likelihood to make a purchase this year? Let's discuss it below.

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[Jason Ross]

Have to disagree, here, Matt. I'm a self-admitted uniform dork; I've been a member of the Chris Creamer boards for a decade, an avid reader of UniWatch, and I can tell you the term for how you properly roll up your pants to show the sock is called "blousing". Generally speaking; I think almost everything the league is doing with the uniforms (which includes the addition of advertisements) is generally rough. Though some teams are starting to get it (teams like San Diego and Minnesota who have properly blended traditional uniforms with slightly updated looks).

The names of the back, specifically, the arching and the kerning, both devalues the player's name while increases the logo of the MLB. We can be cynical and say this is on purpose, or that it's simply an oversight from Nike in terms of placement, but it's not a good look regardless of purposefulness. It looks cheap on top of it. 

As well, the striping on the sleeves has changed. And not for better. The placement and thickness has changed. And while some may like it that way, a uniform, at least IMO, shouldn't be changing because of decisions made by Nike or Fanatics, but because the team has changed design. While we might get a few extra pinstripes, I'm not sure that's a good thing or a bad thing. One thing I can say confidently is I haven't really thought the teams needed any more stripes, and there comes a point of overkill. I suspect in the end the extra handful of stripes will probably be net neutral. 

The league is already heading towards a crisis design-related that leagues like the NBA, NHL and the MLS are headed down; where teams are funneling "city-themed" uniforms into the sets to sell more. The issue is that teams, regardless of how nice these sets may or may not look, must be consistently changed to meet the demands of merchandising. The NHL hit "jump the shark" levels on the second iteration of their reverse retro, and NBA teams have ran out of interesting ideas for some franchises a while ago. The Marlins are already on record stating that the reason they dropped their excellent throwbacks in 2024 is because they didn't see a major increase in jersey sales. 

If I sound like a uniform curmudgeon...I am. Just overall, the fact that the league has gone with Fanatics here (regardless of the Nike name) is a kick in the shins. The NHL did the same thing and it's not been met with anything positively. At best that was a neutral move, but the sweaters there didn't change base on a new template. However in the past, both the NHL (toilet bowl collars) and the NFL (weird flex collars) have met with enough backlash they ended up needing to change them. Those weren't specifically Fanatics related, but I have a feeling if the MLB can't fix this with this template, the next template we get will go back to a better looking name plate on the back. At the very least, Fanatics probably doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt based on the history of their products.

/end dorky uniform rant.