This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between. Please join the mailing list and share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing. (It’s still FREE to join the list for now: Just click “None” on the “subscribe now” page.) If you like what you read, please spread the word, or consider chipping in and allowing me the time to do a little more research on on these posts. You’ll get full access to the archive of more than 100 previous posts, as well.
I.
In 1963, an ornery iconoclast decided to mount a direct challenge to the largely colorless world of Major League Baseball. And so Charles O. Finley, then the owner of the Kansas City Athletics, asked for an exemption from section 1.11 of the rule book, which mandated that home uniforms be white and that road uniforms be gray. Granted that approval, Finley chose to dress his team in what the newspapers called “Tulane gold” and “Kelly green,” and what Yankees manager Ralph Houk called “screwball uniforms.”
Hence, the Technicolor age of baseball began, and over the course of roughly 15 years, it led us to this zenith of garish countercultural fabulousness:
II.
It is not easy to tease out the timeline of how or when people started wearing replica jerseys to sporting events in America. But per my in-depth research—which mostly involved reading a couple of dense studies about British soccer jerseys, watching some 1990s hip-hop videos, and perusing this SFGate slideshow of Giants fans—it seems to have crept in during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was, not surprisingly, around the same time that apparel companies like Nike began signing deals with both professional sports leagues and with colleges like Penn State, which—in perhaps the most striking example of corporate sports-creep of the era—began displaying the swoosh on its otherwise classically plain uniforms in 1994. At the time (and even now), it felt like adorning a Rothko painting with the Apple logo:
By 1999, at least on the college level, at the University of Oregon, the cart had begun to drive the horse: The uniforms—often deliberately garish—were now what sold the program, largely because the official uniforms were now put directly on sale to the public. And increasingly, a single company had a monopoly over the product, which meant, as fans, we actually had fewer and fewer choices over what to wear.
III.
The most weirdly radical column I ever published during my time at ESPN was probably this one, in 2008, in which I utilized the loss of a prized sweatshirt to lament the fact that Nike and companies of its ilk were slowly developing a monopoly over sporting apparel—and were, in fact, slowly making everything worse:
The problem is not really with Nike, anyway. The problem is we largely seem to have stopped noticing the convergence of commercialism and romanticism in sports, to the point that our alma maters feel they can sell us on virtually anything manufactured by their corporate partners, so long as it makes us feel appropriately nostalgic.
IV.
Most of what I have written over the course of my career has not been terribly prescient, but I thought about that column again this week as Major League Baseball made yet another dumb P.R. mistake, this time by releasing new Nike-branded uniforms that were flimsy and sheer and cheap-looking, even as the very same jerseys were being sold to fans at the price of roughly four hundred dollars.
Whether intentional or (more likely) just a dumb mistake was the culmination of decades of commercialism overshadowing creativity; it is yet another example of how, over the course of roughly 70 years, an out-of-the-box thinker attempted to improve a product, and how the next generation made this product available to the masses, only to eventually enshittify the product to the point that it is essentially devoid of life.
V.
Perhaps the most exciting element of adopting a new sporting allegiance, as I have done since moving to the West Coast a decade ago, is the opportunity to buy more clothing that I do not need (although I have not and will never buy a replica jersey as an adult, because, as previously mentioned, I am an adult). But here is what I observed, upon searching for the type of apparel that would be synonymous with the name of this newsletter: The vast majority of the stuff being sold on the official team websites is absolutely terrible.
And I realize that I am not the target audience for much of it, but a lot it is just patently idiotic. To wit:
Those are the San Francisco Giants’ “City Connect” uniforms, manufactured, like everything else, by Nike. They are supposed to evoke the city’s fog, and I kind of admire City Connect’s effort to at least attempt to infuse some color into baseball, but a lot of them just feel…off, as if they were assembled in a lab rather than dreamed up by weirdo artists. The Giants uniforms, in particular, are such a piecemeal assemblage of San Francisco cliches and experimental logo fonts and colors that they mostly resemble a gallon of watery orange sherbet mired in a tub of dry ice.
Honestly, I cannot recall the last major uniform change in either college or professional sports that actually felt like an improvement, unless it was essentially a throwback regression in itself (it’s very possible I’m missing something here, and if so, feel free to weigh in with a comment below.) But is it a coincidence that the two newest teams in baseball—the Tampa Bay Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks—have been sporting the league’s worst uniforms since their inception some 25 years ago?
And maybe all this just means I’m getting old; maybe it’s nostalgia and middle age playing tricks on my mind to the point that I can’t recognize what’s actually good anymore. But I wonder if it’s also because these big companies have already got a monopoly on our sartorial choices, and because they funnel those choices through so many layers of corporate checkpoints that what emerges on this other side is essentially stripped of any real character. Then again, we’ll wear what they tell us to wear; they really can sell us on anything.
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Perhaps one of the reasons the Dodgers (my team) and the Yankees have hats and uniforms that are iconic and recognized all over the world by fans and non-fans alike is that they seemingly have changed very little over the years. That said, I remember fondly the summer - it seems like one summer but it was probably more than one - when the Padres broke out the ugly mustard yellow and brown uniforms and the White Sox sore the long sleeves and shorts, like a city softball team. Whither Greg Luzinski?
Part of the charm of baseball is nostalgia; things like white at home with the name of the team (Yankees) and grey on the road with the name of the city (New York). Yankees have resisted putting names of players on the uniforms. I hope they resist this stupidity too - Arnold Tilden