Major League Baseball's exhibition season got underway on Thursday with a game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, the same teams who will kick off the regular season on March 20 in Seoul, South Korea. The rest of MLB will begin their own spring training schedules over the coming days. Yet the return of actual baseball games has not quieted players' discontent with the league's new uniforms.
For those out of the loop, MLB players are sporting new Nike Vapor Premier uniforms that are manufactured by Fanatics and that are supposed to provide a "lighter" fit than the old jerseys. The early returns, both from fans and players, have been overwhelmingly negative.
This is what the back of the white jerseys look like with the new template. Players are pretty unhappy. Miles Mikolas says they also don’t fit right; pants are no longer as customized, and the fabric is a very different consistency.
— Jeff Jones (@jmjones) February 13, 2024
“They look cheap,” another player said. pic.twitter.com/UoH4vVHTfd
The main critiques include reduced lettering size on the back of jerseys, as well as the poor fit and the "cheap" look. There's also, we regret to note as players are being photographed across camps for future promotional material, the matter of transparent pants. That last part has raised such a fuss that MLB Players Union head Tony Clark commented on the matter on Thursday.
"A lot of the rhetoric is confirmation that the pants are see through," Clark told reporters, including ESPN's Jesse Rogers. "It's been an ongoing conversation where each day has yielded something new that doesn't seem to make as much as sense as you would like it." (Clark added, in a quote that should be enshrined in the Hall of Fame at once: "Universal concern is the pant.")
An MLB spokesperson issued a statement to Lindsey Adler of the Wall Street Journal on Friday that refuted claims about the pants being thinner or more transparent than in years past: "The uniform pants have the same material and thickness as the uniform pants used last season. There were changes to the fabric of the jersey, not the pants."
It's unclear if MLB, the MLBPA, Nike, and Fanatics can or will come up with a remedy to the players' uniform blues before Opening Day arrives -- Rogers notes that an MLB spokesperson said that "adjustments are being made to the jersey size, waist, in-seam, thigh fit and the bottom of pants." If not, players may have to resort to wearing additional gear underneath their uniform pants in order to prevent revealing a little too much of themselves to onlookers.
