Welcome to the 2025 MLB Uniform Preview series for the National League Central.
This will be part of a much larger 2025 MLB Uniform Preview which will include not only all the uniform news and updates for all 30 teams, but it will also include the multitude of changes which have taken place to uniforms overall. While Nike has addressed a good number of issues raised after last season’s disastrous debut of their new uniform template and material, a few issues won’t be addressed until after the 2025 season concludes. Other big uniform news — like the return to teams wearing their regular uniforms in the All-Star game — will all be included in the full MLB Preview, which will be released on Thursday, MLB’s true Opening Day.
The National League Central consists of the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Milwaukee Brewers, Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Cardinals. Most teams in this division will have uniform changes for the 2025 season.
Chicago Cubs
While Opening Day for most MLB clubs is scheduled for Thursday, March 27, the Chicago Cubs (and Los Angeles Dodgers) have already played two regular season games, as the two clubs opened their 2025 season in Tokyo, Japan. Despite being the designated home team for both games, the Cubs wore their home pinstripes for one game, and their road grays (both seen above) for their second game. This allowed fans to see both teams’ home uniforms (and road unis too) during the special series. You’ll note there are special Tokyo Series patches on the jersey sleeves (as well as a special ad patch and helmet adverts as well).
The Cubs have had a busy off-season, uniform wise, as well. Two major changes are coming for 2025.
The first is the introduction of a new alternate uniform, which has all the hallmarks of a new City Connect — which I incorrectly assumed it was when first unveiled. As it turns out, despite being City Connect-esque, the Cubs are designating this as an alternate for “Core Four” purposes. Here’s a look at the full uniform which will make its debut this spring.
Speaking of the “Core Four” last season the Cubs wore pinstripes at home and gray uniforms on the road. They had only one alternate jersey, and that is royal jersey, which the team wore frequently on the road. The Cubs also continued to wear their original “Wrigleyville” CC uniform (which debuted in 2021). The team has announced they have now retired the CC for 2025, and will not be introducing a new CC this season. So, even though their new alternate “Blues” uniform is considered an alternate, it’s basically a replacement CC.
However, based upon MLB’s nomenclature, the new full uniform is designated as an alternate. So the Cubs will join the Yankees and Athletics as the only MLB teams without a City Connect uniform for 2025. Their Core Four therefore are white, gray, light blue, dark blue.
Cincinnati Reds
The Cincinnati Reds will continue to wear their home white and road gray uniforms in 2025. In 2024, the team only filled three of their four “Core Four” slots, with their sole alternate being their script “Reds” jersey. The Reds also continued to wear their City Connect uniform, which was introduced in 2023.
This season the Reds will have some additions to their uniform lineup. New for 2025 is a white alternate jersey, which is basically their current home jersey, but with the front number and red placket piping removed. As of this writing the team still hasn’t officially announced this as an alternate.
This will be added to the Reds’ Core Four, so they are now at maximum: white home, gray road, red alternate, white alternate.
In addition, the Reds will have a black memorial jersey sleeve patch for Pete Rose — baseball’s all time hit king — who passed away on September 30, 2024.
Milwaukee Brewers
Aside from the league-wide alterations to the template, the Brewers have no announced uniform changes for 2025.
Their Core Four consists of the above cream home uniform and road grays, with their alternates being a white pinstripe uniform and a navy blue road alternate.
In addition to the Core Four, the Brewers will continue to wear their City Connect uniform, which was added in 2022.
While the team won’t have new uniforms, they will have a memorial patch for this season. Unfortunately, the legendary Bob Uecker passed away this past January, and the team has added a special memorial patch which they will wear for the full season.
Like Ueck, the patch is unique, a gold and navy plaid print in “honor of the colorful sportscoats Uecker wore at various times during his life.”
Pittsburgh Pirates
Like the Brewers, the Pittsburgh Pirates have no announced changes to their uniforms for 2025. In addition to their home white and road gray uniforms pictured above (from 2024), the Pirates wore two different black alternate jerseys in 2024. The first alternate jersey features a gold “P” and number at the top left and bottom right of the jersey. That jersey saw extremely limited use in 2024, being worn only twice. The second black alternate, featuring “Pittsburgh” in black outlined in thick gold, with jersey number at the lower left, was worn quite often.
Those four jerseys constitute the team’s Core Four. And of course, the Pirates also have a City Connect uniform (and that’s where things got very interesting in 2024).
The City Connect depicted above is the one they originally debuted in 2023.
But the Pirates, last season, decided to have a bit of fun with their standard CC and wanted to see how it would look if they tried mixing and matching different elements from their regular uniform sets.
In June, the team started by pairing their gold “PGH” CC jerseys with black alternate caps and white pants.
The difference was like night and day.
But they weren’t done. The team tried several additional combos, all mixing and matching various uniform elements.
They pulled out an all-black combo, pairing their alternate black caps with their “Pittsburgh” black jerseys and CC pants:
They also paired their regular CC cap and jersey with white pants:
I actually preferred the mix/match (all black and gold over white) to the “normal” CC look, and I believe the players and fans enjoyed the variety as well — for those of a certain vintage, it probably brought back some memories of the “We Are Family” era uniforms worn by the Pirates in the late 1970s. Since none of last season’s “mix and match” games were announced ahead of time, they were a surprise when they were first worn. There have been no indications whether the Pirates will continue to mix/match in 2025, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they do.
St. Louis Cardinals
The St. Louis Cardinals, like the Phillies in the NL East, are one of several teams that don’t really have an alternate jersey, but rather have two alternate uniforms. As such, they wear their home whites and road grays during Spring Training, so the photos above are from 2025. In addition to the home and road, the Cardinals also wear a off-white uniform with “St. Louis” as their wordmark. These are generally worn for home Saturday games. For Saturday road games, the Cardinals will wear a powder blue uniform. While several MLB teams sport powder blue uniforms (either throwbacks or fauxbacks), the Cardinals are the only team to wear theirs on the road.
And of course, the Cardinals have City Connect uniform, which they debuted last year.
The Cards didn’t have a specific “rotation” location for the CC, and it was mostly worn on Fridays and Sundays last season.
And while the Cardinals have no announced changes to their uniform rotation for 2024, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any uni news for the club. The preseason gave us some new new views of the 2025 template and how it was differently handled on the white and gray jerseys.
Here’s the difference between the collar treatment (“sun collar” at left, plain collar at right):
Finally, here’s an infographic created by Susan Freeman showing the NL Central uniforms (cap, jersey, pants) by their official colors. The top line shows cap colors, middle is the jersey, and bottom is the pants. If the pants have a stripe, that is included as well. All “4 + 1” (Core Four plus City Connect) are shown.
You can use this explainer to see the specific breakdown of the cap/jersey/pants.
This article will be updated as any additional uniform news for NL Central teams occurs.
Definitely NEED that Uecker patch.
Susan might want to go to TruColor.net to find more accurate RGB values for the colors. That lemon yellow color used for the Pirates is a tad jarring. The graphics are otherwise quite fine.
I used TeamColorCodes.com. But it does not always specify between print and uniform. I will look into the site you suggested.
Looks like it is hit or miss on that site too. They just don’t look the same on the screen as on the uniforms. These charts are just a few weeks old – I will continue to look for better matches. By the way, I did not bother with the reds and yellows – for example, Athletics just comes off too orange on this chart.
Unless something has changed, the Cardinals wear a navy blue cap on the road if the other team has a red cap. Also, the Cardinals wear a navy and red bill cap with a bird on a bat on Sunday home games. Appreciate the graphic, but definitely needs updating.
There are indeed a few instances where teams do wear a different cap in certain games. I have tried to figure out a way to annotate that in the graphic – in my full spreadsheet I have asterisk notes to the right of the charts. But we decided to go with the simplified approach (and as documented by the MLB Style Guide) for these articles.
In a vaccuum, that new Reds alt is ok. In context, it’s a damn weird decision. After having no non-BP jersey 2nd alt for a while, they bring one in and it doesn’t have anything to make it stand out at all. It was never officially announced or hyped up either, which is odd. That would be forgiveable if it was just being used for the Speedway Series game, but it appears that’s not the case.
To make things even worse, they had a much better and easier decision they should have made. This year is the 50th year anniversary of the first Big Red Machine trophy. It would have been one of the easiest slam dunks ever to just slap together some 70s throwbacks unis, make those the Sunday home unis and call it a day.
Good Idea. We need more ideas like that from the teams.
Reds wore their new alternate in a game against their prospects, but they didn’t have names on the back.
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Not sure if that’s the plan (plenty of room for names with how low the number sits) or if there was a time crunch in getting them ready.
I hate the Pirates uniforms. I’ve hated them since 1985. If they’re gonna play like crap because the ownership doesn’t care at least look good while doing it.
The lede image prompted this question in my head, what do you consider a baseball team’s main identifying mark, their cap logo or their primary logo (think Yankees top hat and bat)? Also what are your thoughts when a team just defaults their cap logo as their primary logo?
I tend to think of the primary logo as a team main identifying mark, and thinks it is lazy when they just use their cap logo doubles as primary logo.
I’m the opposite.
I see their cap logo as their main logo.
Reds absolutely need to lose the black outlines and that gawdawful font. If Cincy management is that confused, just look at any of the countless photos of the Big Red Machine and mimic that.
Agreed. The letter and number fonts from 1999-2006 were much better. Also drop the headspoon on the home jersey. The red alt would look better with block arched letters.
That new Cubs uniform is a nice throwback to the 1970’s Expos.
Central is a pretty good looking div, uni-wise. Though I really dislike the cream Brewers homes. That needs to be white, instead of looking like dirty laundry or the team that hangs out in a smoking club.
That Cards hat with “STL” in a straight line is hideous. Seriously, the classic “StL” is one of the best logos in all of American sports. Why downgrade from that, ever? Sigh.
I’d love to see the Pirates continue to mix and match. Them using the Stargell Stars “Batting Practice” hat for the their in-game uni is pretty cool. A rare example of the merch tail, wagging the in-game uni in a good way.
I don’t love that the Brewers use the ball-in-glove logo within the roundel as their main logo. It makes the star of the show, the glove, too small. It completely disappears on the score ticker on sites like ESPN. The ball-in-glove says everything you need to know without the circle and “Milwaukee Brewers” spelled out.
I think the early 70’s Brewers Uniforms were the best. The brewers need to get rid of the Cream Uniform and and change it to white. The Navy alt would look better if they dump the ugly headspoon and change the lettering to the same as the gray road uni. I think the plain old M looks better than the ball in glove logo.
The years run together, but I’m pretty sure it was last year when the Reds wore TWO Alt Red jerseys. The second being the one with Mr Redlegs on the chest. They used to wear it mostly for ST, but they wore it at least once in the regular season. The fact that they retired it and wore their script “Reds” for ST is additional evidence that the alt white will be announced sooner than later.