It sucks that everyone wears All-Star uniforms instead of their own uniforms
I'm taking a stand on this completely irrelevant issue
Look, I don’t want to make it seem like this year’s All-Star Game is going to be worse than last year’s. First off, I don’t even remember last year’s All-Star Game, which generally isn’t a great sign. Second, we’re here to talk about uniforms, and last year’s uniforms were awful:
Now that I’ve looked up last year’s game, by the way, a 5-2 victory for the American League in which Brandon Crawford went 0-for-1 with an error, I certainly hope today’s game will be more interesting.
Last year’s uniforms were awful. They were the Turn Ahead The Clock Night uniforms, but without the novelty of there being more than two of them. They were an 11-year-old’s conception of a cool design for the future. They were ugly, bizarre, pointless, cringeworthy, and absolutely unnecessary.
This year’s uniforms are…gold.
I mean, that’s not as bad. The National League unis are just white home unis with gold lettering, and the American League’s are gray (but not road gray) with the same gold lettering. They are mostly their normal uniforms, if someone did a color replace in Photoshop. They’re not last year’s unis. They’re not awful.
But they’re also not right.
All-Star uniforms should just be your normal uniform. If you really, absolutely, desperately have to get fancy with them, then add a star somewhere. But don’t come up with a whole new thing just so you can sell it to fans and make a bunch of money, and then make a new one the next year and repeat the cycle, thus increasing your cashflow by creating new collector’s editions of jerseys every year, ones in which each team is guaranteed to have at least one representative. I mean, don’t do that.
Sure, doing that is a guaranteed short term money maker for a sport that has cannibalized itself in order to make more money in the short term, but I’d still prefer they stop.
One of the most charming aspects of the All-Star Game is seeing all the guys wearing different uniforms. They’re not one team. They’re not supposed to be one team. It’s weird and unnatural to see them all on one team. Dodgers and Giants on the same side? Phillies players hoping that New York Mets don’t fail spectacularly? Anybody at all being able to stand the Cardinals? It’s unnatural. Unseemly. Perverted.
That’s exactly the appeal.
By putting everybody in the same uniform, or essentially the same uniform, indistinguishable from a distance because the coloring is all the same, you flatten the impact of the game. It’s no longer a disparate group of players who have to come together in unlikely fashion to win one game or forever be shamed by history. Now it’s just a team. A really good team, but they all have basically the same clothes on, so it’s a team.
Back in the olden days, players wore their normal uniforms because that was all they had. Back then, it was out of necessity, but necessity is the mother of tradition, and so it stayed like that for a long time. It wasn’t necessary to keep that tradition going, but it was part of what made baseball baseball. It was part of the fabric of the game, one of its quirks.
Since Rob Manfred became commissioner, baseball has been removing its quirks one by one. Sometimes umpires get calls wrong? Now we all wait four minutes for a different umpire in New York to say what the right call is. This dude who completely sucks shit at hitting is in the lineup? Remove him and replace him with a dude whose only job is to hit. Gambling is verboten, to the extent that it ruined the legacies of two of the greatest players of all time? Well, if you use promo code MLBVERBOTEN on DraftKings today, they’ll match your first $50 of deposits!
There is a part of me that watches baseball today, and sees how it has gotten sleeker, and crisper, and more professional, that misses what it used to be. This is, without a doubt, the onset of terminal fogeyism, but I can’t help it. I liked seeing all the different uniforms on the field at the same time. It was fun.
Now, instead of fun, MLB will get to sell All-Star jerseys. That’s a win for them. I think it’s a loss for everyone else.