Today in the Ticker: Some items from the start of the Premier League season, a national park-based promotion, and more.
Uni Watch News Ticker for August 14, 2023
Posted in:
Baseball
MLB
- “Back in April of 2020, I shared a Ticker item about how there’s a spot in the parking lot of the Denver Broncos’ stadium commemorating where home plate was at old Mile High Stadium, where several minor league teams and the Colorado Rockies played from 1948 to 1994,” says Kary Klismet. “Last year, I discovered that the home plate memorial had been repainted, but was pointing in the wrong direction. The home plate has now been repainted once again (somewhat hastily, by appearances) to return it to facing the correct direction.”
- The Arizona Diamondbacks’ Zac Gallen is a big fan of the team’s throwback uniforms. (From Mike Chamernik)
Minors
- The Triple-A Durham Bulls are continuing an annual tradition of wearing Hurricanes colors on Sept. 1. (Thanks, Phil)
- The Single-A team in Rome, Ga., is changing its name from “Braves” for next season and wants ideas from fans. (From Elias Anker and Kary Klismet)
More
- The Korea Baseball Organization’s Kia Tigers are holding a uni-based promotion for Mudeungsan National Park, in Gwangju where the team is based, this week. (From Jeremy Brahm)
Football
NFL
- On Saturday, Ravens mascot Poe was wrapped in bubble wrap, roughly a year after it (or its portrayer) tore its ACL during a halftime show. (From Andrew Cosentino)
- The Broncos’ retired numbers have a new appearance. (From Kary Klismet)
- This week’s crop of uniform rankings includes ones on the NFL’s helmets as well as the new alternate helmets. (Thanks, Phil)
College
- There’s also a ranking of Big Ten helmets including the conference’s new additions. It’s from an Ohio State blog and they’re ranked second behind Michigan. Go figure that one out… (Thanks, Phil)
- It’s the 100th anniversary of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium and one writer thinks they should wear blue for one game this season, which they wore in the first game in the stadium because of a color clash with Oklahoma. (From Phil and Kary Klismet)
CFL
- The Argonauts debuted dark blue pants yesterday. (From Moe Khan and Wade Heidt)
Hockey
College
- Robert Morris’s men’s team revealed new uniforms. (From Phil and Kary Klismet)
More
- The Union Hockey League, an American men’s senior A league that just renamed itself from the North Eastern Hockey League, has eight new team names and logos. It seems to consider itself separate from its predecessor. (From John Cerone)
Basketball
WNBA
- Mercury PG Diana Taurasi threw the first pitch at Saturday’s Diamondbacks game wearing a No. 10,000 jersey after she became the WNBA’s first player to reach 10,000 points. (Thanks, Phil)
More
- “Here’s a story about a Dallas-based tailor shop that makes custom suits for inductees to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame,” says Kary Klismet.
- Also from Kary: The Wossman (La.) HS girls’ team got state championship rings.
Soccer
International
- Dominica: Reader Aaron Allerman was watching a game from the men’s Dominican Premier League on FIFA+, FIFA’s streaming service that shows live games from primarily obscurer countries’ leagues, both men’s and women’s. The match was between Pont Michel and Middleham United, but if you find yourself watching obscure soccer you might know that you often can’t exactly see anything well. “I did look up the two kits in a vacuum and they both look really nice and wanted to pass them along,” Aaron says of both Pont Michel and Middleham United’s kits.
- England: The blog Museum of Jerseys is planning to host pages on all of this season’s kits for the top four men’s tiers. The previous site that did that, Historical Football Kits, will stop adding new designs going forward and only focus on historical updates.
- England: Premier League officials have new shirts.
- England: New second shirt for Tottenham Hotspur of both top tiers.
- England: Nottingham Forest and Chelsea both started the Premier League season without an ad for their men’s team, Forest for the second year in a row, though I assure you they’re both seeking one. (From Timmy Steffes)
- England: Crystal Palace striker Odsonne Edouard’s number fell off spectacularly on Saturday. (From Mike Burnett)
- Germany: Bayern Munich revealed a white third shirt to be worn in both the men’s and women’s UEFA Champions Leagues as well as on Saturday in the men’s DFL-Supercup. (Thanks, Phil)
- Germany: New third shirt for Hertha BSC of the men’s 2. Bundesliga. (From Ed Żelaski)
- Scotland: The owner of a Substack on the Scottish Women’s Premier League had AI design a shirt for every SWPL club. The results are, predictably, a little bizarre.
- Scotland: The SWPL has its own number font for the first time.
Auto Racing
- Next year, NASCAR Cup Series driver Kyle Larson is making the first attempt to complete both the Indianapolis 500 and Coca-Cola 600 since 2014. His car designs for both races were revealed yesterday.
Grab Bag
- The Boston Globe had a piece on Saturday on Oxford Pennant, the company that made the Uni Watch pennant among other ways it’s featured on the site. (From John Fitzgerald)
- “Here’s an article explaining the meaning of, and changes to, the colors of Starfleet uniforms over the course of the Star Trek movie and television franchise,” says Kary Klismet.
- Based on preseason photo shoots, Virginia field hockey has new orange shirts compared to last season.
- Western bus stops have nothing over Soviet bus stops. (From David Firestone)
Comments (21)
Man, the Broncos retired #18 looks awful. So many questions. Why not have two #18 signs, one for each player? Why cram in the years Manning played? Why didn’t Manning do the honorable thing (like Aaron Rodgers recently) and wear a different number? Is either player really worthy of Broncos number retirement? Barring special circumstances, I think a player should spend five years minimum with a team to be worthy of number retirement.
That’s the old sign. The new sign is down below in the article, and just has the numbers encircled. Notably, the numbers are not in the current jersey font.
The new retired numbers sign is an improvement because of how much cleaner it looks. That little “Manning 2012-15” addendum to the #18 sign was always a head-scratcher for me. The number is retired for Frank Tripucka, was temporarily unretired for Manning with Tripucka’s blessing, and then put back into retirement after Manning hung up his cleats.
The team quietly added the Manning sign below the big “18” sometime after Manning’s retirement in the spring of 2016. They never formally retired the number for Manning. (Conversely, the team held a big halftime to-do at a game when Manning was inducted into the Broncos’ Ring of Fame.) So is the number retired just for Tripucka? The old sign implies that it’s retired for manning, too, but all it really lets you know is the years that Manning wore it. The new sign, with just the number, makes it even less clear. I guess the one thing we know is that the number will almost certainly never be worn again after what Manning accomplished in it for the Broncos, so fans can draw their own conclusions.
For what it’s worth, Broncos fans definitely think Manning is worth of having his number retired. He may have played only four years with the team, but they’re four of the greatest years in franchise history. Outside of John Elway, he’s arguably the most popular former player among Broncos fans (and his popularity might even exceed that of Elway right now, considering how the team fell out of contention during the final few years of Elway’s stint as GM). It doesn’t hurt that Manning has made his post-retirement home in Denver and makes lots of appearances in the community and at games. Colts fans may stew with jealousy, but Manning has clearly made his choice about which team he wants to be associated with in his retirement.
Oops. I was looking at the OLD number display. The new one is a big improvement. I track back everything…er…most of what I said.
I think those Tottenham second shirts are pretty great–I had been unsure of them when I saw the leaks, but they look sharp on the pitch. Appreciate the relative simplicity after a couple seasons of some over the top designs.
First good Spurs shirt…ever?
I don’t think so. The white look Is quite nice and clean.
There have been plenty of nice Spurs second/third kits over the years, and the home kit is a good design more often than not.
I recently noticed what looks like a horizontal stitch across the button-down area of Cubs closer Adbert Alzolay’s blue alternate uniform. In his next appearance, I noticed the same horizontal stitch aross the button area of his road uniform, below the CHICAGO lettering. He seems to have had these uniforms altered to make them into a henley-style shirt. Further investigation shows that his home pinstripe uniform also has this stitch. I am off to find out if his city connect uniform is also altered this way.
Wear blue for a Husker home game? Oh, HELL NO! I get it’s part of history, but we have enough problems with Creighton fans wearing their blue to Husker home games. We call them “Jayskers”. It’s not a term of endearment. Go Red or go home.
According to Baseball America, merchandise revenue is driving the decision to rename the Rome MiLB team.
“So why would a Braves’ affiliate dump the Braves’ brand it has used since its founding to adopt a new name and logo? The simple answer, as usual in rebrands, is a financial one.
“For decades, many around the minors have believed that the Braves were leaving revenue on the table by opting to keep their MiLB teams tied to the big league club’s name and branding. Eventually the Gwinnett Braves, the team’s Triple-A team, did rebrand as the Gwinnett Stripers, but the Double-A Mississippi Braves and the High-A Rome Braves have remained tied to the big league club’s name, logo and coloring.
“While the Braves’ brand is quite strong, Braves fans are more likely to purchase Atlanta Braves gear rather than Braves’ gear of an MiLB affiliate. And the MiLB teams that sell the most merchandise have consistently been ones with unique names, logos and colors. …
“Under the new Diamond Baseball Holdings ownership, it is likely a rebrand will drive larger revenue with increased sales of hats, shirts and other merchandise both locally around Rome and also nationally. So that’s the logical reason why we’d see DBH looking to change the brand of a team that has held that identity for the past 20 years.”
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Interesting, when the Chicago Cubs took over the affiliation with the South Bend team in Class A about 10 years ago, they required the team to rename as the Cubs and change colors to blue and red. They had previously been the Silverhawks, a reference to a Studebaker auto that was manufactured in S Bend. They used green and gray or green and yellow as their colors for many years
Back in the day when MiLB teams (and cities) were long-time affiliates of their parent clubs, it made sense for them to have different, or even regional names (I’m not talking about the ridiculous names some have now). Most fans of a ballclub knew at the very least their teams AA and AAA teams (and bigtime fans knew every team’s double and triple-A squads); Once that all went out the window and teams switched MiLB affiliations all the time, adopting a parents’ club nickname (like the Cubs doing, the Mets and others have also done it) at least gives the MiLB observer some sense of what players “belong” to which big league club.
Not defending or endorsing the South Bend Cubs/Silverhawlks rename (or any others), but that does help to explain why it was done.
“there’s a spot in the parking lot of the Denver Broncos’ stadium commemorating where home plate was at old Mile High Stadium”
– They could have painted batter’s boxes on either side of the plate to make it stand out more.
Absolutely! Considering how much effort the team has put into creating the miniature version of old Mile High Stadium in that same parking lot (known as the Mile High Monument and visible in that photo), you think the least they could do is put a little more, time, effort, and resources into preserving the stadium’s history as a baseball venue, for which it was originally built.
glad the soviet union bus stops are getting some time here. They are so wonderful and such a great example of something normally mundane can be turned into functional pieces of art
Here is an on-field look at the new Toronto Argonauts Oxford (dark) blue pants.
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The surprise sprung upon us yesterday. They would look good on the road with white jersey/Oxford blue pants/Cambridge (light) blue socks. Of course with the Cambridge blue helmet because CFL still rocks the one-shell rule.
Just a matter of time before we have the Oxford blue 3rd jersey.
Love the Cambridge Blue, and I don’t *hate* the Oxford Blue pants, but man those “oars” instead of stripes on the pants leg are just brutal. Yeah, I *get* why they’re oars…but it just looks terrible.
I agree. Plus the oar is white on both sets of blue pants. Miss out on the double blue look on the pants. Looked better on the old sets of pants with a stripes and the use of the double blue.
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I wish I could enjoy what Larson will be driving for the 2nd half of the 2-fer…but that dang-gum number placement ruins what would otherwise be a great scheme – and has done much to destroy Cup car aesthetics.
Grrrrr!
Those Middleham United kits are very nice. Of course it helps that there are no visible ads.
A blogger went through the burdens Topps flagship set and found that only two players are visibly wearing stirrups: AJ Pollock and Ranger Suarez. link