5 Retro MLB Designs We Want Back
Every baseball fan with more brain cells than fingers can tell you that teams wearing throwback uniforms is a brilliant idea. From both a stylistic and a marketing standpoint, bringing back classic designs not only celebrates the game's rich history, it provides a fashionable wrinkle during a protracted regular season marked by humidity, pitchers stepping off, batters stepping out and additional delays for replay review.
Paradoxically, old designs help keep the game fresh and new, but teams should not decide to go retro merely for the nostalgia itself. The old Houston Astros rainbow uniforms left lasting memories, but no one wants to bring those back for more than one or two games a year as a lark. Similarly, the Chicago White Sox should never again wear shorts during games.
Instead, only the best aspects of retro MLB design should be carried forth, with a keen sense for both timelessness and era-specific kitsch. The Chicago Cubs wore nine throwback uniforms for the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field, which is slight overkill but still very prudent.
Renewing the retro look offers new opportunity, not just to sell more caps and jerseys, and not just to cheer for bygone days, but also to reinvent the present, which is especially necessary for two teams without a World Series title to their credit: the San Diego Padres and Milwaukee Brewers.
This list by no means forms an exhaustive compendium of retro style in need of a resurgence, but these five designs need to come back in some form, from more pinstripes and different caps to increased simplicity and more powder blue.
Padres in Brown
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How come you never hear about brown anymore? If it works for UPS, it can work for San Diegoans—er, San Diegans—once again. The San Diego Padres need to change the franchise's mojo, as the results on the baseball diamond have been unchanging like the local weather, which is to say, the team consistently fails to win in the playoffs, if it can even manage to get there.
The glorious year that the Padres reached the World Series most recently, they ran into a buzz saw called the 1998 New York Yankees. Aside from '98, the Padres have won a grand total of one playoff series in franchise history dating back to the team's creation in 1969. That came in the 1984 NLCS over the Chicago Cubs, a prelude to the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series in five games.
The entire Padres franchise needs a good shakeup, like a snow globe, and a shrewd first step would come from forging a team identity, something conveyable, memorable, classic yet identifiable—something brown. The early '90s saw the team trend toward using blue and orange, then blue and a sort of sandy color, then they wore khaki for a while. It was atrocious, and mediocrity resulted as karmic punishment.
Beside the Cleveland Browns, a football team initially run by a man named Paul Brown, no other team in sports possesses such a unique connection with the color brown. This offers a chance for the Padres to forge a signature look, something rich and unabashed, in an era of style scrutiny and social media.
Throw the snore-inducing current uniforms in a dumpster behind the stadium and get someone to work on a retro, earthy, kitschy combo of brown, orange and yellow. However, there's no need to bring back that odd swinging friar mascot as a logo. You don't want to frighten young fans like the New Orleans Pelicans.
Real Brewers Wear Pinstripes
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Kudos to the Milwaukee Brewers for reintroducing these throwbacks as the alternate uniform since 2006. Several teams in sports cast their throwbacks as the alternate jerseys, and this look wonderfully captures a time and place in team history that fans will recall fondly. Sure, few people outside of Wisconsin like Ryan Braun, but just focus on the uniforms and the good old days of Robin Yount and Co.
The only problem is the Brewers do not wear these uniforms often enough, and the league needs more pinstripes! The Brew Crew also deploy dark-blue alternates, as well as uninspired white unis at home and gray on the road. Something's got to give.
The team's current primary logo does not so much fit the term "logo," but rather scrawls the word "Brewers" in script across a baseball. Contrast that with the exquisite logo used from 1978 to 1993 (note: Yount retired in '93) and beautifully emblazoned on the throwback alternate caps. As noted on the team's website:
"(The logo) adorned Brewers caps for the 16 greatest seasons in club history...Tom Meindel, an Art History student at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, designed the logo and earned the $2,000 first prize. The logo combines the lower case letters "m" and "b", the club's initials, to form a baseball glove.
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Either make the alternate jersey the everyday home kit, or at least bring back the old logo for good. It's a can't-miss idea. Suffice to say, this team needs to reach back into the past and conjure up the momentum that carried the franchise to its lone World Series appearance, a seven-game loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1982.
Pillbox Caps
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As Bob Dylan once crooned, "You might think he loves you for your money/But I know what he really loves you for/It’s your brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat." While no MLB team would deign to sport leopardskin, the old pillbox-style hats reach into yesteryear and recall a unique fashion with a deep historical tie to baseball. Bring 'em back!
1976 marked the centennial for the National League, and many clubs broke out their vintage pill-box hats to celebrate the anniversary. The Pirates kept the hats going for a little longer than most teams.
Justin McGuire from Sporting News asked writer Dan Epstein, "If a baseball fan from 2014 could be transported back to 1976, what would be the biggest differences he or she would notice?" As Epstein put it:
"They’d certainly see a lot more artificial turf...They’d see players wearing colorful, form-fitting uniforms, unlike the drab pajamas that most current teams wear, and some of them sporting special 'pillbox' caps in honor of the National League Centennial.
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Baseball in the '70s had a loud and proud approach, both in terms of attitude and fashion, similar to the NBA of the 1990s. Pillbox hats refer to those heady days of disco and demolition of said disco, as well as to the simpler days of 19th century baseball, when a base on balls required eight pitches out of the strike zone.
A renewal of the pillbox designs would also mark one of the few recent innovations in hat technology. (Stop making the sweatband more scientifically advanced! It's the baseball equivalent of adding more blades to a three-blade razor.) With the dominant style having become an oversized 59fifty New Era cap with a straight brim, pillbox caps would pose an entirely new fashion quandary for the sport's sartorial sultans.
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Minimalism During the Taft Administration
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Sure, this 1912 style looks like the baseball team from Penn State arrived at Fenway Park for its 100th anniversary in these minimalist uniforms, but they harken back to a simpler time, before names and numbers or precise tailoring. With a jersey made entirely out of wool (or was it burlap 100 years ago?), you want it nice and baggy so it breathes in the August sunshine. Perhaps one day they'll put lights on the stadium for baseball at night. Imagine!
The Red Sox have remained consistent and conservative with their classic uniform design over the years, deviating only briefly during the '70s to get rid of buttons in a favor of a scoop neck for a few seasons. And this trend toward not merely a throwback look, but a positively historic appearance, has been embraced in new designs around the MLB by several teams.
For example, the Cleveland Indians have strayed from the dated, racist Chief Wahoo logo, opting instead for a stark "C" that beautifully complements the classic-looking, off-white alternates introduced in 2008. The block-lettered Chicago Cubs alternate introduced this season appeals to a similar simplicity.
Boston's uniforms from 100 years ago remind fans that breaking the mold of style and design does not have to involve adding more. Get rid of cap logos and numbers! Let chaos ensue as announcers scramble to determine whether a late defensive change was made mid-inning. To complicate the old saying "less is more," the meaning consists in the absence of a signifier.
Back in Blue
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The Philadelphia Phillies need something new, saddled as they are with bloated contracts for disappointing players and their 2008 championship already seeming a distant memory. The road look from 1986 sported by Kent Tekulve could do just the trick to revamp the team and the prevailing attitude around the franchise. (What really needs to be reintroduced are sunglasses for pitchers.) The old logo also looks resplendent.
Bottom line: Get baby blue back in the MLB.
And this is not a team-specific mandate, as with the Padres and Brewers discussed earlier. Powder blue uniforms in any number of hues nearby on the color spectrum were commonplace for road uniforms in the '70s and even earlier. The St. Louis Cardinals had their powder blue period in the late '70s and early '80s, as did the Montreal Expos and Milwaukee Brewers. The Chicago White Sox sported light-blue jerseys during the '60s, and the Brooklyn Dodgers even wore blue uniforms made out of satin way back in the '40s.
The Kansas City Royals occasionally sport their blue alternates, but they leave fans wanting more powder blue, much like anyone who watches San Diego Chargers games. While the Phillies in particular need a change on numerous fronts, no team can go wrong reviving the bygone blues.
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