What Happened to Baseball Jerseys?

Fans are doomed to keep paying more for merchandise they want less.

Last week, as American sports fans’ eyes moved from football to baseball, a great cry—or at least a significant grumble—was heard from MLB players arriving at spring training: The new uniforms are bad.

The MLB announced the uniforms, which have been redesigned by Nike for all of the league’s 30 teams, in a press release last Tuesday. It included praise from some of the biggest baseball names on Nike’s endorsement roster. As images of the uniforms began to circulate, however, a number of other players voiced, shall we say, differing opinions. Many were upset that they’d no longer been given the chance to tailor the fit of their pants. The uniforms are thin and flimsy feeling. Some of the colors seem off. The design elements are poorly spaced and sized, and the lettering for players’ names seems too small. According to The Athletic, some players feel so strongly about the changes that they’ve taken their concerns to their union. The Chicago Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson, who has an endorsement deal with Nike, has said that he contacted the brand himself to see if some of these concerns could be resolved.

It’s hard to dismiss the aesthetic complaints, especially when you compare the new jerseys with those of previous seasons. The new ones look tawdry and a little swagless, like replica jerseys. Fans quickly joined the chorus of outrage. Regular people are the actual primary consumers of pro-sports jerseys, and Nike plans to offer three versions of the new uniforms to buyers, each with varying levels of fidelity to what players wear on field. The two currently available cost $175 and $395. One post on X from the popular MLB-fan account Korked Bats said the jerseys looked like players’ moms had gotten them on clearance at TJ Maxx.

The uniforms might bear the Nike logo, but in looking to assign blame, fans have largely seized on what has become a familiar villain in American sports: Fanatics, the sprawling memorabilia conglomerate that manufactured the new uniforms on Nike’s behalf. Over the past couple of decades, Fanatics (with the apparently full support of all of the major American sports leagues) has upended the licensed-sports-merch market and centralized much of the production and sale of team gear under its control. If you’re a fan who wants a T-shirt or cap with your team’s logo, Fanatics has immense power over your options. Complaints about the quality and prices of the products it sells abound.

The story of how American pro-sports jerseys—baseball and beyond—have lost some of their swagger, however, goes further than a single company. It’s also a story about the nature of sports uniforms themselves, and why fans might be doomed to more disappointment in the future.

As you might expect, complaints about jersey changes are far from new, in baseball or in any other sport. Some level of player pushback tends to crop up any time major changes are made, and the MLB uniforms unveiled this week use what Nike describes as an entirely new “chassis.” (Yes, that is how self-serious these things can get.) Fans, too, tend to be a nostalgic and change-averse group of people, and perhaps in regard to no American sport more than baseball, where some logos, colors, and other aesthetic elements of uniform design date back many decades.

Even so, one has to acknowledge that the new uniforms look like a team of designers sat down with last year’s MLB template and found as many little details as possible to make worse. The off-putting finished product gets only more perplexing the deeper you dig into how the new MLB uniforms came to be. In 2019, Nike won a decade-long contract to design the league’s uniforms, the first of which debuted in 2020. Despite being one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world, Nike has never produced the actual jerseys itself. Instead, the company contracts with Fanatics to manufacture them. This production takes place in a Pennsylvania factory that has made all MLB uniforms since 2005; Fanatics bought it in 2017, and prior to that, it was owned by another jersey maker, Majestic Apparel. Production subcontracting is incredibly common across all sectors of the apparel market. Relatively few brands manufacture their own clothing, usually to save money by using existing manufacturers overseas or to access production capabilities that would be too costly or inefficient to build in-house.

Production subcontracting is just what it sounds like—production. The manufacturer receives the specs and materials and turns them into a product, but it is not responsible for the actual design. By all indications, that’s the case with the MLB jerseys. A representative for Fanatics declined to answer specific questions about the creation of the new MLB jerseys but told me that Fanatics was not involved in the design of the uniforms or the development of the materials used in them. This claim aligns with last week’s press release announcing the new uniforms, which fully credited Nike with everything but the actual manufacture of the garments. The journalist Paul Lukas, who runs the website Uni Watch and has been covering American sports uniforms for decades, came to much the same conclusion.

Nike did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor does the company seem to have addressed the controversy publicly. But the evidence suggests that the flop is on Nike more than anyone else. The biggest sportswear brand in the world delivered a dud.

Part of this problem isn’t really Nike’s, or at least not entirely. An inherent tension exists in the two distinct purposes for which jerseys are developed and sold—for actual athletes engaging in physical competition, and for fans of those players who want to signal their team affiliations to the world. Garments independently purpose-built for each of these users would probably diverge mightily from each other; a 21-year-old elite athlete has different physical needs than a middle-aged insurance adjuster at a sports bar. But jerseys are valuable as consumer products precisely because of their relationship to what a very particular person is wearing when they hit a game-winning home run or burst through a defensive line and into the end zone; fidelity to the original is what makes them desirable.

When the distance between the practical needs of players and the emotional needs of fans increases, the space for conflict grows. Over the past few decades, high-end athletic-apparel brands have sunk their resources into developing proprietary synthetic textiles that they claim outperform more traditional fabrics when used for actual physical activity—things with trademarked names such as Dri-FIT and AEROREADY and HeatGear. Garments using these textiles are generally cut close to the body, and they promise to be lightweight, stretchy, highly breathable, moisture-wicking, and quick-drying—the kind of thing you want to wear when your job involves a lot of running or twisting or jumping, especially in summer heat. (For brands, cycling new materials through pro equipment also serves another purpose: Creating an association with elite performance is a potent marketing opportunity to sell expensive workout clothes.)

Over time, more and more design elements of professional sports jerseys have bent themselves to this same logic of thinner, lighter, stretchier. Details that in the past might have been highly textured have been lightened considerably, and are even screen-printed or heat-pressed by some brands. Those changes reduce bulk and remove stitchwork that could impede the textile’s ability to stretch. These changes can also make production and maintenance of these uniforms cheaper and easier. The end result is a flatter, simpler-looking garment, but one that should, at least in theory, perform better under extreme conditions of human movement.

What makes for a good piece of performance gear, though, doesn’t necessarily make for a good piece of casual clothing. Jerseys are expensive, and for many of the people who buy them, they’ll be among the priciest garments they’ve ever owned. What signals quality in regular clothing is everything that performance brands have worked to strip out of athletic apparel: thick, weighty textiles; layers of added detail; textural variation; embroidery. Sports fans are also a nostalgic beast; the people with enough money to buy official jerseys en masse are likely at least approaching middle age, and for a lot of fans, how a jersey should look is however it looked when they first became a fan, back when jerseys were thicker and more embellished and had bigger, blockier proportions. This is not a strictly rational thought process, but sports fandom isn’t rational. This is true of the players, too, who were usually fans first. When Dansby Swanson calls up Nike to make sure that the team takes the field on opening day wearing actual “Cubbie blue,” it’s not because doing so will make him a better shortstop.

Practicality is only part of the explanation, however. Some of the changes made to the new uniforms—especially a lack of customization options in the fit of the pants—seem to be more about ease and cost of manufacturing rather than adhering to the on-field preferences of elite competitors. (Nike has sent tailors for addressing this issue to at least one team, the Cincinnati Reds, but according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, those tailors will only tweak waists and inseams, not overall fit.) Shrinking down players’ names, too, serves no discernible performance advantage and makes the real jerseys look like hastily drawn-up knockoffs.

These changes point to a larger issue that’s driving so much dissatisfaction with team merch in general, among players and fans alike. Design and fabrication duties used to be shared by many different brands and producers; for much of professional-sports history, teams all chose their own jersey suppliers. But those duties have become more and more centralized in the past few decades, leading to a market where the aesthetic choices are controlled by a very small group of companies—Nike, Fanatics, a handful of other inescapable sports brands—that have dominion over nearly the entire market, no matter the sport. The result: A lot of things now look sort of bad, and also sort of the same. When one of those brands duffs a new release, far more people notice because it affects a far wider swath of fandom than it would if the decision making weren’t so centralized. Nike didn’t make just one baseball team’s jerseys reminiscent of a knockoff—it made all 30 look that way. It’s no coincidence that as this collection of behemoths has executed a widespread blanding of the sports-merch market, sales of vintage sports apparel have exploded

This phenomenon is hardly limited to sports. Clothing is available in larger quantities than ever before in human history, but that quest for scale has resulted in reduced quality and an inescapable blandness all over the apparel market—in knitwear, leather goods, clothes of all kinds. Fans venting their frustrations over jerseys have likely encountered a version of these issues while trying to buy other things, but the jerseys are a bridge too far. Sports are such a potent presence in American culture because they are an animating force in how so many people relate to their family or to their city or to their understanding of themselves. Sports are compelling precisely because of all of the emotional heft that humans invest in them, and all the meaning we imbue in particular colors and fonts and markings as a result.

When companies and organizations with near-infinite money and resources—Nike, MLB, Fanatics, whoever—cannot even seem to bother to get those things right on behalf of all the people who have made them rich, the fury it elicits is maybe not rational, but it’s legitimate. They have you over a barrel and they know it, because you have nowhere else to turn if your son wants a jersey for his birthday or your team wins a championship and you want an object to remember it by. No one has to do a very good job, and they’ll still get to charge you $400.