Milwaukee is currently awash in blue and gold, as the city celebrates the Brewers’ first World Series championship. As you probably know, the Brew Crew got those colors from their franchise forebears, the Seattle Pilots, who played their first and only season in 1969 and were then sold to a Milwaukee-based ownership group fronted by future MLB commish Bud Selig about a week before the start of the 1970 season. There wasn’t enough time to manufacture new uniforms for the renamed and relocated team, so the Brewers wore old Pilots uniforms with the insignia removed and new “Brewers” and “Milwaukee” lettering hastily added. That’s why you can see the Brewers wearing the Pilots’ unusual sleeve trim in the photo shown above, which is from the first game in Brewers history.

But what if the sale of the team had been finalized a bit earlier, allowing enough time for the Brewers to wear new uniforms instead of repurposed hand-me-downs? What would those uniforms have looked like? Photos of early Brewers prototype designs have been circulating for years, although it’s never been clear which of them (if any) would have been in line to become the team’s inaugural uniform. Now a fascinating new piece of evidence has emerged — although, if anything, it makes the situation more confusing than ever.

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The earlier article addressed the American League teams. Today we’ll look at the National League. Once again, I’ll be focusing on teams with three-color striping, although I also threw in some interesting two-color oddities.

We begin with…

Atlanta

Atlanta was a little late to the sansabelt party, scrapping their traditional belted pants in 1980. From that year through 1986, the three-color striping pattern on their waistband didn’t match the color sequence on their sleeve cuffs. (The road set avoided this issue by going with symmetrical two-color striping on both the sleeves and pants.)

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I recently wrote about the bewildering uniform situation surrounding the early-1970s Baltimore Orioles. Among other things, I noted that their 1972 road jerseys were almost the same as the ones they’d worn in the 1971 postseason, except that the color sequence on the sleeve cuffs had been reversed. As I wrote, “[The] ’72 jersey sleeve striping sequence makes more sense than the ’71 postseason version. If the black stripe is on the bottom, it just blends in with the black undershirt. Putting orange on the bottom provides some contrast.”

But there’s another factor I didn’t mention: The ’72 sleeve cuff striping matches the pants striping on the sansabelt waistband, which seems like, you know, how things ought to be. Once you notice the cuff/waistband mismatch in the ’71 photo, it feels like like the cosmos is slightly out of alignment, no?

And that got me thinking: During MLB’s sansabelt era — 1970 through 1992 — how often did this type of cuff/waistband mismatch happen? It seems like the kind of thing I would have written about years ago, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never looked into it.

As I pondered that question, I quickly realized that a few teams used solid-colored sansabelt waistbands during this era, so there were no striping issues for those clubs. And lots of other teams went with symmetrical two-color striping for both the pants and the sleeves. The real issue, then, is how teams with three-color striping — like the Orioles — handled things.

Creating a comprehensive account of this phenomenon is more complicated that you might think. Back in the sansabelt era, most teams used different manufacturers for their home and road uniforms, and many of them occasionally reused old jerseys or pants from previous seasons. Also, as we’ve seen before, Marc Okkonen’s “Dressed to the Nines” uniform database is not always accurate, so we can’t treat his mock-ups as gospel.

So instead of trying to piece together a definitive guide to three-color cuff and waistband striping, I’ve identified the teams that used three-color striping for at least part of the sansabelt era and shown some of the ways they handled things. This is not meant to be a complete or authoritative account; it’s more of a survey of some of the ways teams addressed the cuff/waistband issue.

I’m leaving out the Orioles, since we’ve already discussed them. Ready? Here we go:

American League

Cleveland

Cleveland’s uniforms were a bit of a jumble during this period — they had red alternates, navy alternates, the blood clot combo, and more — so perhaps it’s not surprising that they were inconsistent about whether their cuffs and waistbands matched. Sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn’t!

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Earlier this week I wrote about six MLB teams that have changed their uniforms for the World Series. Shortly after that piece was published, reader Patrick Manion posted a comment about a team he thought I’d neglected to include: “Didn’t the Orioles also make a fall classic change in 71 to double knits or similar?”

The answer is yes — sort of. And the more I looked into the particulars, the more I realized that the Orioles’ uniforms were quite a jumble during the early 1970s. Granted, this was a complicated period for MLB unis overall, because teams were transitioning from flannels to polyester doubleknits, but the Orioles appear to have been in a greater state of flux than most other teams. The situation is further muddled because one of the primary uniform reference guides has done a poor job of documenting it (although another guide, thankfully, has been much better).

Here’s a year-by-year look at what the Orioles were wearing at the dawn of the polyester era:

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The World Series begins Friday night in Milwaukee. While it’s impossible to predict what will happen on the field, it’s safe to say that we know what the uniforms will look like. Unless there’s a huge surprise being kept under wraps, they’ll be the same uni designs the Brewers and Rays normally wear, except for the addition of the World Series patch.

That’s how it usually works — but not always. On at least six occasions, big league teams have changed their uniforms for the Fall Classic. Here’s a rundown of those six teams, plus a bonus team that planned to make a uni change for the Series until fate intervened.

1905 New York Giants

As you can see by the little “WS” label in the graphic shown above, the Giants broke out a black uniform — basically a reverse-field version of their standard design — for the 1905 World Series.

Here’s a photo of Giants manager John McGraw wearing the black uni just prior to the start of Game 1:

The player in the center of the photo is Philadelphia Athletics captain Lave Cross, who is presenting McGraw with a little white elephant figurine. McGraw had previously referred to the A’s as a “white elephant” (i.e., an overpriced novelty). The Philly team embraced the derisive moniker, which is why the A’s still wear a white elephant sleeve patch to this day.

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Two of my very favorite things in this world are (a) a baseball uniform with properly worn stirrups and (b) bowling. It had never occurred to me that those two things could be combined until I saw the old wire photo shown above.

The photo is from July 10, 1964. It’s hard to read the sideways caption, so I’ve transcribed it here:

Yogi Berra, New York Yankees manager, fires the ball down the alley — bowling alley, that is — in a bowling exhibition with Washington Senators manager Gil Hodges prior to the Yankees-Senators baseball game in Washington tonight. Hodges is seated at left with his [bowling] partner, Jim Robinette, one of the Washington area’s top bowlers, and Bob Stampe, right, 1964 All-Star bowler, who was Berra’s partner. A regulation bowling alley was set up on the infield in D.C. Stadium for the event. Hodges is in the bowling business in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Berra in Clifton, N.J.

I love that Yogi is wearing bowling shoes with his full baseball uni. I was hoping to find a similar photo showing Hodges bowling in uniform but came up empty. I did, however, find a very informative article from The Washington Daily News that explained how the event came about and how the lane was set up on the field (see highlighted sections):

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There was a serious feast for the eyes on display last night in Denver, as the Broncos and Seahawks both wore throwbacks, and holy shit did it look great. This was a treat on several different levels:

• First, the retro uniforms are both better than the teams’ current primary designs, so that was an upgrade for both clubs.

• Second, it’s always better when both teams are wearing throwbacks, instead of just one team.

• Even better, these two throwbacks are from the same era, and the two teams were division rivals during that era (the Seahawks moved from the AFC West to the NFC West in 2001), so this was a very natural uni pairing.

But as you can see in the photo at the top of this page, the old-school uni matchup had a modern twist: The two teams went color vs. color! Obviously, that never happened when these uniforms were originally worn decades ago, so I guess you could say it’s “inauthentic” or “fauxback”-y or whatever, but I loved it. I’m a longtime advocate of color/color games (as long as there’s enough contrast between the two jerseys, obviously), and I’d love to see more of them.

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I was reading something about the Yankees the other day, and the writer referred to the team’s “interlocking ‘NY’ logo.” There’s nothing remarkable about that phrase, of course — I’ve used it plenty of times myself in my own writing.

But are the two letters in the Yankees’ logo (or, more specifically, the Yankees’ multiple logos) really interlocking? No, they’re not. They don’t intertwine or wrap around each other — they’re just overlaid, and it’s not even clear which letter is on top.

By way of contrast, let’s look at the Twins’ logo:

Those two letters can accurately be described as interlocking. The vertical stroke of the “T” passes in front of the top arm of the “C” but behind the back arm. It’s not a particularly complex design, but it’s nonetheless a genuine example of interlocking letters, while the Yankees’ logo is not.

Here’s a simple way to think about it: For a true interlocking design, if you pick up one of the letters — either one — you end up picking up the entire logo. If a logo fails that test, it’s not interlocking.

Let’s look at some other current and historical MLB team logos and see if they qualify as truly interlocking:

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This year’s Major League Baseball postseason kicked off yesterday, as the four wild card series began. And that meant it was time for ads to reappear on batting helmets (above), catchers’ helmets, and coaches’ helmets. These postseason ads began appearing in the 2024 postseason, so this is the third year for them.

You all know what I think of uniform ads, so I won’t belabor that point. Instead, I want to explore a question that somehow hadn’t occurred to me until now.

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Hello! If you’re reading this post on the web, look up at your browser’s address bar. You’ll see something familiar up there: uni-watch.com, which was the old Uni Watch blog’s URL for many years before I shut down that site a few months ago and moved Uni Watch’s operations to Substack. Now I’ve applied that old URL, which I still own, to the Substack site.

Let’s shift to Q&A mode:

I’m reading the emailed version of this post. How do I see the new URL?

For any emailed Substack post, you can click on the headline (in this case it’s “Big Uni Watch News!”) to see the web version of that post. Or you can just go to the Uni Watch home page here. In fact, I recommend that you check out the home page so you can see the archive and various other features linked from the home page’s navigation bar.

I already bookmarked uniwatch.substack.com. Will that URL still work?

Yes. The old address will automatically redirect to uni-watch.com. (I did the same thing two years ago with my other Substack project, Inconspicuous Consumption, which was originally at paullukas.substack.com, but that now redirects to inconspicuous.info.)

The uni-watch.com URL is stupid and confusing, because it includes a hyphen. That just makes people mistakenly refer to Uni Watch as Uni-Watch.

Agreed. Here’s the backstory: When web developer John Ekdahl (R.I.P.) and I launched the blog in 2006, we used uniwatchblog.com (to differentiate the blog from the Uni Watch column I was writing at the time for ESPN). After a few years, when it was clear that the blog had developed its own community, its own culture, etc., we wanted to switch to uniwatch.com, but that was already taken — some guy in Panama was squatting on it. We made several offers to him, but he wouldn’t budge. So we went with the hyphenated version — uni-watch.com.

The hyphen isn’t ideal, it’s true, and it can definitely lead to some confusion about the project’s name. But the same could be said about uniwatch.com, because it would lead people to mistakenly think that Uni Watch is one word (Uniwatch or UniWatch). There’s no perfect solution, except maybe uni_watch.com, and I would never do that because the underscore looks so awkward.

Did it cost you anything to make the URL update?

Substack charges a one-time $50 fee for applying a custom domain.

Why did you wait until now to have the Substack URL redirect to the old blog URL, instead of doing it right when the Substack site launched a few months ago?

Honestly, I hated the hyphen and was initially glad to be rid of it. But I ultimately decided that it’s more fun to have a custom domain name instead of a Substack-based URL, plus I figure there could still be some old blog readers out there who haven’t checked in on Uni Watch in a while and might plug in the old URL. If even one person does that and discovers Uni Watch’s new iteration, it will have been worth it.

Also, I have to admit, seeing the old URL up there on the address bar makes me feel like I’ve reconnected with an old friend. Sure, it may be a flawed, imperfect friend, but whatever — most of us are flawed and imperfect. I like that it provides a throughline of continuity from the old blog, and I hope you feel the same.

I think that’s it. If you have any other questions about this, post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Uni Watch, created by Paul Lukas, has been covering the world of athletics aesthetics since 1999. He also writes Inconspicuous Consumption, which is sort of like Uni Watch for everything other than sports.

When people ask me about the uni-verse, I always say hockey has the most interesting uniforms. For starters, every part of the player’s body except the face is covered, so there’s a lot of real estate to work with. Second, there’s the oddity of the short pants paired with the long stockings. Third, hockey doesn’t require a uni number on the front, so there’s lots of room for a visually powerful chest mark. Fourth, hockey is the only sport that routinely treats the shoulder yoke as a design element. Fifth, goalie masks and pads are a whole sub-niche of visual interest. And last but not least, hockey is the only one of the Big Four sports where the jerseys are always designed to be worn untucked, which allows for belly striping, contrast-colored hemlines, and so on.

But there have been several players over the years who prefer to wear their jersey tucked in. The prime exemplar of that style nowadays is Flyers center Trevor Zegras (shown above), who’s been tucking the back of his jersey into his pants for several years. But he may have to curtail that shirttail quirk: Zegras was called for a minor penalty for “improperly wearing the equipment” in last night’s Flyers/Bruins preseason game. The website Scouting the Refs reports that it was the first such penalty since 2013.

But it probably won’t be the last. After Zegras was penalized last night, NHL Network insider Elliotte Friedman tweeted that the call was part of a larger crackdown on equipment-related issues:

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When I wrote yesterday about the Rays’ new road greys, I mentioned that the team was poised to possibly set a new uni-related record. Here’s the situation: Entering play yesterday, the Rays were in first place in the American League East, and their magic number for clinching the division was two. They were scheduled to play a split doubleheader against the second-place team, the Yankees, and the new greys were slated to make their on-field debut in the nightcap game. So if the Rays lost the first game but won the nightcap, they would clinch the division during the new road uniform’s inaugural game.

As you can probably surmise from that image shown above of third baseman Junior Caminero, that’s exactly what happened.

While I haven’t done any deep research on this, I think it’s safe to say that this is the first time an MLB team — or, most likely, any Big Four pro team — has clinched a division, league, or championship title, or even a wild card berth, while wearing a uniform for the first time. Or to put it another way, the Rays’ new road uni has just set the record for the fewest on-field appearances (one) for any uniform worn in a clinching game.

All of which leads us to an obvious question: Which uniform(s) previously held that record?

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You don’t expect to have MLB uniform news breaking in late September, but that’s what happened yesterday, as the Rays announced a new set of road greys (shown above). The new design will make its on-field debut tonight, in the second game of the team’s split doubleheader against the Yankees. Since the Rays’ magic number for clinching the American League East is two, they could end up clinching the division while wearing this design, which would presumably mark the first time in MLB history that a uniform’s on-field debut was also a clinching game.

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Journeyman NHL right wing/thug Ryan Reaves announced his retirement on Instagram the other day, bringing an end to his 16-season career. The Associated Press’s report on this development, which was picked up by dozens of other media outlets, began with an intriguingly uni-centric slant, as follows:

Enforcer Ryan Reaves said Wednesday he is retiring from hockey at age 39 after playing more than a decade and a half in the NHL, leaving just three players left who do not wear a visor.

Now that’s what I call a proper sense of journalistic priorities! If only every sports news item could lead with the story’s uni-related implications.

In case you’re wondering (as you should be): Hockey visor history is a bit sketchy, but research by the Society for Independent Hockey Research indicates that the first clear face shield was worn by Cariboo Hockey League player Kenneth William Clay in 1964, after he suffered an on-ice eye injury. A similar situation led Ontario Hockey Association player Kevin Neeld to create the “Neeld Shield” in 1973. Neeld eventually wore his visor while playing in the WHA, but the first player to wear a visor in the NHL appears to have been Islanders right wing Anders Kellur in 1979. An increasing number of NHL players began wearing the visor over the next few decades, until the league finally made visors mandatory for new players in 2013, with existing players grandfathered. Now that Reaves is hanging up his skates, the league’s last three visor-free holdouts are Predators center Ryan O’Reilly, Stars left wing Jamie Benn, and Wild defenseman Zach Bogosian.

This same cycle — innovation, big league debut, gradual adoption, grandfathered mandate, and universal use after the final holdout either retires or joins in — can be observed for lots of other sports safety accessories. In Major League Baseball, for example, DIY batting helmet earflaps eventually led to the first true earflapped helmet in 1964. The flap gradually gained acceptance throughout the 1960s and ’70s and then became mandatory for new players in 1983. It initially appeared that the last grandfathered holdout was Red Sox DH Gary Gaetti, who retired in 2000, but then Tim Raines, who had retired in 1999, came out of retirement in 2001 and continued to play in 2002 before finally retiring for good, making him the final flap-free MLBer.

I’ve created a table showing how this cycle has played out for a bunch of different safety innovations in MLB, the NFL, and the NHL:

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Early July was a busy time — Independence Day, summer vacations, Uni Watch moving from the blog to Substack. So it’s possible, maybe even likely, that you missed a major uni-related development that took place on July 11. In fact, I initially missed it myself.

That’s the day that MLB pitcher Chris Paddack, having been released by three teams over the previous two months, essentially gave up on his MLB career and signed a contract to pitch in Korea. That was very bad news because, as longtime readers are well aware, Paddack had been a Uni Watch favorite due to his impeccable stirrup stylings since arriving in the big leagues in 2019. In 2022 I even interviewed him about his stirrup practice.

Unfortunately, two Tommy John surgeries and other physical maladies took their toll on Paddack’s pitching. But while his mound game faltered (his record this season was 0-7 with a 6.79 ERA), he remained a true stirrup stalwart to the end, continuing to wear the old-school look during his short 2026 stints with the Marlins, Reds, and Rangers. (Sadly, he’s been wearing socks, not stirrups, for his new Korean team, the Samsung Lions.)

But as so often happens in this world, when one door closes, another one opens. In this case, Paddack’s departure from the big leagues has cleared the runway for the emergence of a new hosiery hero. Ladies and gents, I give you Guardians pitcher Parker Messick.

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I confess that I had never heard of Hyrox — a hybrid fitness race that combines running with workout stations — until a couple of days ago. Neither had lots of other people, perhaps including you.

But I’ve definitely heard of Hyrox now, and I bet you have as well, because a Hyrox athlete named Joanna Wietrzyk — a 24-year-old Australian who’s the Hyrox women’s world record holder — has gone viral after she suffered an apparent bout of gastric distress and had literal excrement running down her legs while competing at an event in Beijing over the weekend. Or to put it another way, she suffered the ultimate uniform mishap.

Despite the obvious risks of cross-contamination, especially in a sport that has multiple athletes using communal equipment at shared workout stations, Wietrzyk was allowed to remain in the race (and ultimately won!). Hyrox officials initially praised her perseverance through adversity but then backtracked and said she should have been removed from the event once she became a walking biohazard. They’ve amended their rules accordingly.

As you might expect, this storyline has generated a lot of media coverage, which leads to a tricky question: What’s the best way to describe what happened to Wietrzyk? If you’re a magazine that’s allowed to publish profanity, like Rolling Stone, you can give your story a snarky headline like “This Hyrox Race Became a Literal Shitshow.” But what if you’re an ostensibly respectable news outlet that wants to describe a dirty situation without using dirty words?

Here’s how more than a dozen media operations answered that question while covering the Wietrzyk story, in roughly ascending order of explicitness:

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As we approach the first Sunday of the NFL season, I want to take a moment to address an important uni-related development that you may have missed — or at least you may not have realized its uni-related significance.

I’m talking about NFL commish Roger Goodell’s new four-year contract extension, which was announced last weekend. It will keep Goodell running the league through March of 2031, by which time he will have been commissioner for 25 years — longer than anyone except Pete Rozelle.

Goodell’s no angel, and there are plenty of valid critiques that could be leveled at him, but I was still happy to hear he’ll be sticking around. Why? Because he is apparently the bulwark that has kept advertising patches off of NFL uniforms.

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Uni Watch is usually about the visual world, but today I want to talk about something from the world of words and phrases. Consider Reds pitcher Andrew Abbott, whose stats are shown above (and who I chose completely at random for this discussion). For most of my life, a writer or broadcaster referring to his earned run average would use one of the following phrasings:

• “He has a 4.43 ERA.”

• “His ERA is 4.43.”

• “… and a 4.43 ERA.”

But at some point in the past 10 to 15 years, we entered a new ERA era. It’s increasingly likely that a writer or broadcaster discussing Abbott’s statistics would now say that he has “pitched to a 4.43 ERA.” To be clear, the older wordings are also still in use, but the newer “pitched to a” wording has staked out some serious rhetorical real estate in recent years, and its use appears to be growing.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, the “pitched to a” phrasing makes me itchy. Maybe it’s that it feels unnecessarily wordy and thus inefficient; maybe it’s that it sounds too jargon-y; maybe it’s just that it’s not what I grew up with. In any case, it seems like a classic case of fixing something that ain’t broke. If the guy has a 4.43 ERA, just say he has a 4.43 ERA! But an increasing number of baseball media members apparently don’t see it that way.

Why did this new expression come into vogue? Does it reflect some sort of newfangled approach to assessing statistics? Something analytics-driven, maybe? My initial research came up empty, so I contacted longtime baseball scribe Jay Jaffe, who currently writes for FanGraphs after previous stints at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus, to see if he had any insights.

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By now you’ve probably heard about the uni-centric events of last Friday’s Cardinals/Rockies game, when Cards pitcher Hancel Rincon, who was making his big league debut, was told by home plate umpire Doug Eddings to straighten his off-center cap.

Just about everyone seems to agree that Eddings was out of line, and maybe a liar to boot (he claimed after the game that he had ordered Rincon to reposition his cap because a Colorado player had complained that the off-center headgear was distracting, but the Rockies denied that). Eddings apologized to Rincon the next day, reportedly after being reprimanded by the league office for overstepping his authority. Players on both teams wore off-center caps on Saturday as a gesture of support for Rincon. The Cardinals’ Double-A affiliate has even turned the incident into a promotion by announcing a crooked cap giveaway for this Thursday.

Moreover, as Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol pointed out after Friday’s game, Rincon is hardly the first MLBer to wear his cap off-center. Marmol cited Dontrelle Willis, Pedro Strop, and CC Sabathia as previous exemplars, and I’d toss in Pokey Reese, Ian Snell, Alex Colome, and my favorite, Abe Alvarez, who was was legally blind in his left eye and rotated his cap to that side to help cut down on flickering light and shadows.

In short, the consensus among just about everyone except Doug Eddings is that players should be able to wear their caps however they like. But that leads us to a question I’ve been pondering for a while now:

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As you’ve probably heard by now, Red Sox radio broadcaster Will Flemming generated some controversy during Sunday’s Bosox/Yankees game by suggesting that the Sox should bean a Yankees player in retaliation for Yanks second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. stealing two uncontested bases during the 8th inning of a lopsided game. Flemming then indicated that the Sox pitcher at the time, Jovani Morán, should fight Chisholm.

Flemming’s on-air comments (for which he later apologized) echoed a lot of the chatter surrounding Mets reliever Jefry Jan’s airborne strikeout celebration, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. Lots of people, including one Uni Watch commenter, have suggested how lucky Yan is that pitchers don’t have to bat anymore, so he can’t be beaned in retaliation for his antics.1 Mets Police blogger Shannon Shark (full disclosure: a friend of mine) went further, writing, “If he does this to me, the next time I’m up I lose [the] grip on the bat and it accidentally goes flying at the mound.”

Some people refer to this type of retaliation as “the players policing themselves,” or “enforcing the unwritten rules,” or “on-field justice,” or “making sure the game is played the right way” or “making sure they respect the game.” Those phrases all sound righteous, but that righteousness, however good it may feel, really boils down to a simple point of view: “I think you’re a jerk, and therefore I feel entitled to physically assault you.” It’s the worst, most immature kind of Neanderthal behavior — much worse than the perceived slight it’s responding to.

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