2021 MLB Regular Season thread

Gosh I hate that shit. When I seize power as total dictator of sports, my first edict will be, you get two uniforms, one for home, one for away. And they'd better not be purple and black.

 

I hate it when I'm watching highlights on ESPN or MLB and I can't figure out who's playing.

 

"What the fuck, man?"
— The Colorado Rockies, Minnesota Vikings, Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings

 

If your team’s primary colors include green, the camo hats look good. Otherwise, ugly.

 

Vikings and Lakers have purple and gold. That's a good combo. I should have said, "if black is not one of your primary uniform colors, it's not allowed." The Celtics had superb uniforms and altered them as a sacrifice to the merch god. As for the Rockies, they have the ugliest unis in baseball. Quite a distinction that.

 

You're a member of the United States armed forces. You're maybe at Bagram Air Force base loading pallets full of crap into C-17s headed out of Afghanistan. You're an overworked seaman in some warship who's spent the last six months doing China-watching in far Pacific. You're a member of a Marine Expeditionary outfit on a too small troopship sailing off the Horn of Africa, you know, just in case. Life sucks. But then you see Clayton Kershaw in a camo cap and go "That's the stuff! I'm re-enlisting."
PS: There are currently no, none, zero MLB players who have served in the armed forces.

 

The Rockies' purple jersey is pretty sharp. The black alternate is awful, though.

In general, I like teams having three or four uniform sets. It mixes things up over the course of a long season, instead of just seeing home whites and road grays for six months straight. Like anything else, though, moderation is the key. Mix them up in the right formulas, like a Sunday alternate or a throwback you wear once or twice a year, and they stay fresh. I think MLB and the NFL do it pretty well. I don't watch enough NHL to judge.
The NBA is an absolute disaster.

 

Agreed. Also, I note that the NBA has flipped the most basic switch and home teams now wear colors, not white. When I was a boy, white at home, colors on road was part of the damn rulebook. But really, why would the Celtics or Yankees or Canadiens have more than two unis? I note that Alabama football, which has enjoyed a certain measure of success, hasn't changed its unis in my lifetime, which is a long time now.
Also the Raiders have never (yet) changed their two uniforms. Probably show up for the home opener in the colors of the Bellagio fountain.

 

IIRC, the Celtics have for a long time had a special St. Patrick's Day alternate uniform. It was a slightly deeper shade of green with gold around the numbers. That goes back to what I was saying, though. They only wore those once a year, maybe twice if they busted them out on Christmas. You don't mess with the great classic looks.

A couple of the others you mentioned have actually tweaked things on occasion. Alabama broke out some white helmets for a few games in the 80s. The Raiders had a slightly different look in the 1960s than they established by the 70s. The Cardinals, of course, had their powder blue period in the 70s and 80s. And the NHL also went to the color at home/white away format a few years back.

When I think of the NFL, it's amazing how many teams have kept their same basic look for decades or just modernized it slightly here and there without a total overhaul. If you look at one of those boards with all of the helmet stickers on it from the late 1970s or early 80s, at least half the league looks the same now as it did then.

 

Not totally a coincidence this is our most successful sports league. I wrote a column once way back in the day, like late '90s, that a team changing its uniform design and/or colors was a sure sign of an organization that sucked and had no idea of how to stop sucking. Stand by that opinion.

 

It's funny, though, that a bunch of the NFL teams that did do total overhauls in the late 90s -- the Broncos, Bucs, Cardinals, Jets, Giants, Patriots -- have stuck with them now for 25 years or so, to the point that those looks are now somewhat iconic in their own right.

 

True story: In 2001, the Patriots' plan was to go back to the old red with blue hoops home unis and the white helmet with Pat Patriot for 2002 when Gillette was gonna open. Then they won the Super Bowl and the plan went out the window. Vinatieri isn't such a good kicker, their uniforms are totally different today.