SecondIn the 1990s, the New York Yankees had a top executive-Assistant arrive If memory serves me, the traveling secretary is a firm believer in the power of breathable uniforms. But even George Costanza is unlikely to adapt to baseball’s latest sartorial change.
Ahead of the upcoming season, Major League Baseball announced plans to update the game uniforms for all 30 clubs. The league has made other attempts in recent years to breathe new life into America’s boring old pastime. What’s more, it’s almost too fitting that the poster boy for the issue is the game’s biggest draw.
When spring training began last month, there was enthusiastic anticipation for Shohei Ohtani’s first shot in a Los Angeles Dodgers uniform since the Japanese star received a historic 10-year, $700 million contract from the club. But his official team portrait appears to pry the two-way star away from the crosstown Angels at the expense of the Dodgers’ apparel budget. “Why does Otani Shohei wear see-through pants?” It was a swift reaction from the Japanese media, which until recently made headlines when Ohtani announced his surprise marriage to “an ordinary Japanese woman.”Action footage from spring training games shown What else do players risk by showing off? If they bend over or try more technical baseball moves, it’ll be in their pants. “I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot more homeless people this year,” host Jimmy Fallon said on “The Tonight Show.”
In addition to being too revealing, the numbers and letters on the jersey are also in a smaller font. In what Nike calls a knock-on effect of using a lighter material designed to be 25 percent more stretchy and 28 percent faster to dry, the company designed the new uniforms but is still made of polyester. Did you know they used to make casual suits out of this fabric?
All the new baseball uniforms being aired right now seem to be frustrating players. One Orioles player who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Baltimore Standard that his new-look uniforms feel like “a TJ Maxx knockoff.” The Kansas City Royals successfully lobbied to keep their old lead.san diego padres hope no one noticed They pass off 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 what we’re used to.” Although Nike says it body-scanned “more than 300 MLB players to find the ideal fit.”
The discomfort is so widespread around the league that players have complained to the union in hopes of delaying the rollout of new uniforms until changes are made. Fans, meanwhile, can’t help but see this discomfort as more evidence of how much Commissioner Rob Manfrund hates his sport. “This is an ongoing conversation,” union president Tony Clark told reporters after meeting with Dodgers players last week about new uniforms, adding that he hoped to resolve the issue before the end of spring training. “I don’t want us to be talking about some of the challenges we face in this area when the lights come on.” Even so, MLB remains defensive about its garish rags. Dennis Nolan, Alliance’s senior vice president of global consumer products, called it “world class.”
Whenever a clothing reform occurs in sports, the immediate comments are bound to cause outrage. When Nike introduced new college basketball uniform styles more than a decade ago, many sports fans couldn’t imagine kids at Duke or Kentucky pairing baggy shorts with tight sweatshirts. But it wasn’t long before the trend took off, and the actual game of basketball gained traction again before anyone really noticed that the shorts had shrunk to smaller sizes. The tone is equally harsh when NBA teams display “City Edition” colors, NFL teams “think pink” and any league attempts to interpret these fashion lines as more than just a blatant money grab.
Still: MLB’s uniform disintegration feels a little different, and it’s just the latest example of contraction and expansion. For most of this century, MLB uniforms were manufactured by Majestic, a nearly 50-year-old company in Pennsylvania’s textile corridor. But then in 2017, the company was acquired by Fanatics, an online sports merchant run by Michael Rubin, a Philadelphia-area tech bro and 76ers Former partner, now famous for taking over the mantle of the Hamptons’ all-white parties from Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs. . Ever since Fanatics entered the world of licensed sportswear, they’ve earned a reputation among customers for selling low-quality merchandise at a considerable premium.
Last September, a Philadelphia Eagles fan recounted spending $80 on a Kelly green T-shirt with Jalen Hurts’ name and number on it. Another fan reported that he spent $110 on an Eagles windbreaker, only to have the team’s logo completely disappear. As millions of fans went public with similar complaints, Fanatics paused shipments of Eagles gear for a quality control evaluation. (“One wrong order or unhappy fan is one too many,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We take every complaint very seriously.”)
None of this insulates Fanatics from further accusations of scarcity pricing, price gouging, or charging extra for jersey sponsor patches, bringing the total damage to a fully loaded official replica to $449.99, plus shipping (free for a limited time) — which is a scam that makes Fund for Humanity look like a real charity. Even though Fanatics paused the rollout of MLB uniforms during the pandemic to produce masks and gowns for first responders on the Covid-19 front lines, it doesn’t appear to have earned any lasting goodwill.
The company’s poor reviews are neatly summed up in a blog post titled ” Fanatics suck.. The pinned post is a parody of a TV commercial for the NHL’s online store – Fanatics jokes, “This store has the largest selection of merchandise. the worst Choose your fan gear anytime, anywhere. Every NHL team and seven players you’ve ever heard of is printed on the cheapest materials from China. ” So, Wall Street is supposedly touting Fanatics, worth around $31 billion“as the Amazon of sports,” even as the company laid off hundreds of employees and named the NFL in an antitrust lawsuit.
On the surface, breathable jerseys are an important idea: Players are cooler, more comfortable, happier—and they’ll play better. But if baseball’s chosen sporting goods supplier has been struggling, the league wouldn’t be surprised if America’s pastime further becomes obsolete.
