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What do you see when you look at San Diego Padres infielder Xander Bogaerts? A do-it-all veteran? A solid defender with a big bat? I look at Bogaerts and I see: powder blue. His team wears one of the most unique color schemes in professional sports, a brown and yellow combination that works a lot better than you’d think. The thing about wearing brown and yellow is that it’s immediately distinctive. You don’t really need to add tertiary colors in order to stand out, the way you would if your team just rocked, say, navy blue and white. Bogaerts, though, has taken to supplementing the brown and yellow with powder blue. It’s…a lot.
And Bogaerts isn’t alone: everywhere you look, players are wearing wacky, non-team colors. Teal, lime green, bright red. Purple and pink! We’ve jumped the shark.
While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with powder blue—or showcasing a bit of personality—colors should still match! Is this a boomer opinion? Probably. But this phenomenon has become too rampant to ignore. It’s relatively new, too. Players like Yoenis Céspedes and Pedro Martínez used a neon arm sleeve or red glove to supply a pop of color to the baseball diamond, but prior to the 2019 season, Major League Baseball required that 51% of a player’s cleat feature their team’s primary color. That would have meant the Padres wearing mostly brown cleats. This would have been bad! But when MLB loosened those restrictions in 2019, they probably didn’t envision that blue and pink (fine in a vacuum, bad with this colorway!) would wriggle their way onto the player's feet.
Don’t get me wrong: self-expression is cool and good. Fighting back against deeply-rooted—and oftentimes stuffy and outdated—qualities of 100-year old institutions is admirable and necessary. But the methods of doing so still matter. In the case of Major League Baseball players incorporating every color of the rainbow into their on-field wardrobe, reversing course on decades upon decades of boring and unimaginative looks, some are doing so in a way that might be doing more harm than good, at least on the eyes.
In his very own division, Bogaerts has a contemporary who is also peacocking, and big time.
Here, Ketel Marte—a very, very good player who’s also the poster child of the accessory crisis—is wearing purple on his sleeve and batting gloves. To be clear, the sleeve, the gloves, and the cleats he was wearing that day are all sick. But the problem is that, even though his accessories pay tribute to the Diamondbacks’ old school purple-and-teal color scheme…the Diamondbacks don’t wear purple and teal anymore! (This is part of the problem, the fact that the Diamondbacks’ constant reinvention has left them without a true aesthetic identity.) They wear red and black now—with, to be fair, a tiny bit of teal. Even more puzzlingly, Marte’s teammate Geraldo Perdomo is predominantly going with yellow around the edges. Diamondbacks’ slugger Joc Pederson is also a fan of sprucing things up with yellow, and it’s not totally working either. With Pederson’s sartorial choices, we’ve got a little ketchup and mustard situation going on.
The Diamondbacks are going to make the playoffs. They could very well go to the World Series again, just like they did last fall. If they do in fact make a long run, putting themselves on giant HD televisions for the entire month of October, it would be nice if they came to a joint conclusion about what colors their team wears.
To reiterate this point one more time, we love to see dudes having fun and wearing what they want to wear. It’s just that some players are better than others at it, and do a great job of understanding what accent colors work with their team’s uniforms. Gaze upon Minnesota center fielder Byron Buxton and his beautiful red earrings. Red, famously, is one of the Twins’ colors!
Others around the league are equally adept at matching their jewelry with their team’s uniform, such as the Rays’ wildly entertaining outfielder Jose Siri. No matter what jersey the Rays are wearing, Siri usually has the right swag.
But for every Buxton and Siri, there will always be guys who either don’t care about matching, have a different definition of what matching is, or maybe just like wearing a certain color. Harrison Bader is one of them, as his purple and pink accessories clash with the Mets’ classic blue and orange on a nightly basis. Same goes for Michael Harris of the Braves, who’s taken a liking to mint green. Mariners’ shortstop J.P. Crawford—always one to march to the beat of his own drum—sometimes is a master of the matching accessories, and other times wears a purple sleeve for some reason.
All in all, the color revolution is a net positive. It’s produced some greatness and some misses, just like any other fashion trend. But also like any other trend, not everyone will agree on how to execute it. If there’s anything to hope for, it’s just that when the players are getting ready for a game and ask a clubhouse attendant for some bright orange or lime green add-ons, some brave clubbies start to say no. And if you’d like to argue about this, see you at the next AARP meeting.