Major League Baseball players pretty much hate their new uniforms. They complain about the pants being see-through so it looks like they’re wearing diapers and their “nether regions” are visible. On top of that, they think the lettering and fabric are cheap and the uniforms are sweat magnets.
Fear not, players. Starting in 2025, you will no longer look like you’re wearing diaper. ESPN reports that the players’ union says the uniforms will be modified.
The prominent modifications include a return to larger lettering on the back of jerseys, remedying mismatched gray tops and bottoms and addressing the new Nike jerseys’ propensity to collect sweat, according to the memo distributed to players by the MLB Players Association on Sunday. …
While the new uniformed debuted at the 2023 All-Star Game, its rollout this spring led to reams of bad publicity. The shrinking of the letter size on players’ name plates gave jerseys an amateur look. The pants — which, according to the memo, will “return to the higher quality zipper used in 2023” — had myriad issues, including the see-through fabric, a lack of tailoring and rips and tears that players believed unnecessary.
The union in its memo blamed Nike for the fiasco, saying “at its core, what has happened here is that Nike was innovating something that didn’t need to be innovated.”
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MLB insists that the pants are the same the players wore a year ago, but a lot of players weren’t buying it. The pants were a big topic in spring training, especially when photos of Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shoehi Ohtani went viral. It did look like he was wearing a diaper or an over-sized pair of boxer shorts underneath.
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As Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal noted in spring training: “Baseball insists these pants are unchanged from last year’s pants — only the jerseys have been updated, MLB [said] — but players sound rattled. Promotional team photos are getting taken in Florida and Arizona, and some of these poor fellows do look like they’re wearing Huggies under their trousers.”
Outsports’ resident baseball experts and fashion critic Ken Schultz noted that, “a few days prior during photo day, an image of San Francisco infielder Casey Schmitt in his skintight new uniform made fans wonder, ‘When did the Giants hire Robert Mapplethorpe?'”
Schultz had by far the best suggestions for fixing the uniforms: Hire Andrew Christian.
“If baseball players are going to take the field in see-through pants, own it and partner with the label that owns the term “Stretch Mesh,” Schultz wrote. “Because of the nature of the game’s actions, many baseball players already have the physical qualifications necessary for Andrew Christian models.”
This whole uniform debate has been a fun part of the MLB season and shows that even a huge company like Nike, with its myriads designers and engineers, can make a major league mistake that has players exasperated and fans giggling.
