by In the ’90s this executive was with the New York Yankees – the assistant to the travel secretary, if memory serves – who believed a lot in the power of the breathable uniform. But it’s unlikely that even George Costanza would have taken issue with baseball’s latest wardrobe change.
Before the upcoming season, Major League Baseball announced plans to update the uniforms for all 30 clubs. The implementation follows the series’ other efforts to breathe new life into an old American pastime in recent years. Plus, it’s almost too fitting that the poster boy for this problem is the biggest draw in the game.
When spring training opened last month, expectations were high that Shohei Ohtani would be clapping in an LA Dodgers uniform for the first time since the Japanese star scored a historic 10-year, $700m contract from the club. But his official team portrait made it look like he was trying to get the two-way star out of the “crosstown” Angels at the expense of the Dodgers’ apparel budget. “Why is Shohei Ohtani wearing see-through pants?” the snap response of the Japanese press, news that had only recently been fronted by Ohtani announcing his unexpected marriage to an “ordinary Japanese woman”. Show action shots from spring training games what else players risked to show in the pants if they bent over or attempted more technical baseball moves. On the Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon had the following to say: “I feel like this year we’re going to see a lot more wedges.”
Apart from being too revealing, the jerseys also feature smaller fonts for numbering and lettering; call them the effects of working with a lighter material designed to provide 25% more stretch and dry 28% faster according to Nike, who engineered the new unis – which is still made of polyester. Do you know that they used leisure suits from that fabric?
All the new baseball uniforms seem to be in the air right now and the players are frustrated. One Orioles player, on condition of anonymity, told the Baltimore Herald that his refreshed strings felt like “a peaked jersey from TJ Maxx.” The Kansas City Royals successfully lobbied to keep their old threads. The San Diego Padres hope no one notices they wear last year’s pants as this year’s pants. Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle told the New York Post that his pants, in addition to being see-through, are “a little tighter than they used to be.” That’s despite Nike saying it has body-scanned “more than 300 MLB players to dial in the ideal fit.”
The discomfort is so pervasive around the league that the players have filed a complaint with their union hoping to stop the rollout of the new uniforms until changes can be made. Meanwhile, fans can’t help but take the misfits as more evidence of how much commissioner Rob Manfrend hates his sport. “It’s an ongoing dialogue,” union president Tony Clark told reporters after meeting with Dodgers players about the new uniforms last week, adding that he hoped to resolve the issue before the end of spring training. . “I’d hate to be in a place where we’re still talking about some of the challenges we have in that regard when the lights come on.” However, MLB remains defensive about its fancy rags. Denis Nolan, the chain’s senior vice president of global consumer products, called them “excellent.”
Any time there is a clothing overhaul in sports, the immediate reviews are bound to happen. When Nike unveiled new college basketball uniform styles more than a decade ago, many sports fans couldn’t imagine the kids at Duke or Kentucky pairing their baggy shorts with skin-tight jersey tops. But before long, the trend took hold and the actual basketball games took center stage again before anyone noticed that the shorts had shrunk to a trimmer size. The tone is equally harsh when an NBA team releases “city edition”, “pink” colors that an NFL team thinks and either team tries to explain away these vogue lines as nothing more than plain cash.
Still: Major League Baseball’s uniform solution feels like something different, just the latest example of shrinkage. Majestic, a nearly 50-year-old firm located in Pennsylvania’s textile corridor, has made MLB uniforms for much of this century. But then in 2017 the company was bought by Fanatics, an online sports merchant run by Michael Rubin — the Philly-area tech bro and former 76ers co-owner who’s now better known for adopting the all-white Hampton party manta from Sean ‘Diddy ‘ Combs. . Since Fanatics has been in the sportswear licensing game, they have earned a reputation among customers for selling poorly made items at a premium.
Last September a Philadelphia Eagles fan had the experience of paying $80 for a pair of green Kelly t-shirts with Jalen Hurts’ name and number misaligned. Another fan reported paying $110 for an Eagles windshield that obliterated all of the team’s logos. As millions more fans went public with similar gripes, Fanatics paused shipments of Eagles gear to conduct a quality control assessment. (“One wrong order or disgruntled fan is too many,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We take all complaints very seriously.”)
None of that protected Fanatics from further allegations of underpricing or price gouging or overcharging for jersey sponsorship patches, bringing the total damage for a fully loaded official replica to $449.99 plus shipping costs (free, for a limited) – a scheme which makes the Human Fund look like an actual charity. Fanatics who halted MLB’s uniform rollout during the pandemic to manufacture masks and gowns for emergency personnel on the front lines of Covid-19 doesn’t seem to have bought any lasting goodwill.
The company’s shabby reviews are neatly summarized in a so-called social media feed Fanatics Sucks. The pinned post is a TV ad for the NHL’s online store — which Fanatics jokingly calls “the largest field of worse fan gear selection anywhere. Every NHL team and seven players you’ve ever heard of, all printed on the cheapest material sourced in China.” So Wall Street clearly falls for Fanatics, even around $31 billion“as the Amazon of sports” even as the company lays off hundreds of employees and is named with the NFL in antitrust lawsuits.
On the face of it, breathable uniforms are a capital idea: players are cooler, more comfortable, happier – they will play better. But if baseball’s chosen attire continues to struggle to thread the needle, the league shouldn’t be surprised if America’s pastime falls further out of fashion.
