MLB changes 2018?

[SportsLogos.Net News]

Orioles Salute Maryland With Special Uniforms

July 15, 2018 - 12:59 PM

The Baltimore Orioles showed off their Maryland-pride last night by wearing uniforms clad with the unique pattern seen on the state’s flags and other symbols. Available for auction after the game, the uniforms incorporated the Maryland design onto the visor […]

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[kroywen]

8 hours ago, Dolphins Dynasty said:

Whether or not it's the A's, someone in the league really needs to use Kelly green.

 

There's really no natural contenders outside of the A's, though, and I'd ultimately rather see forest green (which has become a rather underappreciated color, IMO) in the league than kelly green. Maybe if the Rays were to do a full rebrand, though I think they'd be more likely to incorporate the darker green that they had worn through most of the 2000's than to introduce a brand new shade of green.

 

Kelly green can be a great color, and it's a shame that it virtually disappeared from sports somewhere in the mid-90s, but I don't think there's a great need for an MLB team to wear it. The Eagles? Bring it back. The Jets? Maybe. But I think the A's look immeasurably better today than they did in the 70's and 80's.

[Cardsblues02]

Some cities will just never be baseball towns. For example St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, ect. are all great baseball towns. Nice ballparks with large local and national fanbases. Win or lose, fans show. Heck, I go to the :censored:show that is Cardinals baseball at least 10 times a year! Buy merchandise and food. So even when these teams are bad, people show up.

 

Houston, the city I live in, will never be a baseball town. The locals have little knowledge of players or the game, people don’t know simple stuff about baseball, and only pay attention during the playoffs. It’s really quite annoying that nobody seems to give a you know what about this team. But they don’t. The Rockets and Texans are popular and get good attendance, but the Astros don’t. Houston has seen a significant incline in attendance numbers, but thats expected with a World Series winning team. No one was an Astros fan in 2011. The Cardinals played an important game in town on the final day of 2011, maybe 70% of the people where Cardinals fans. I almost felt bad for the ‘Stros. And the crowd wasn’t better than 12k.

 

I think some cities just don’t work as baseball towns. Miami, St. Pete, Houston. They do what it takes to stay afloat, but never go above and beyond. Not saying these teams will relocate because they won’t. But some of these teams have to win to put butts in seats.

[Bill0813]

Same cap as last year.  Black jersey instead of white.

[SilverBullet1929]

But how did all these cities that we consider great baseball towns become great baseball towns? Seems like every great baseball town is just the ones that have had teams since the early 1900s more or less.

 

Where those cities clamoring for their teams a hundred years ago as well or does it take a hundred years to get to that point? 

[The_Admiral]

2 hours ago, kroywen said:

 

There's really no natural contenders outside of the A's, though, and I'd ultimately rather see forest green (which has become a rather underappreciated color, IMO) in the league than kelly green. Maybe if the Rays were to do a full rebrand, though I think they'd be more likely to incorporate the darker green that they had worn through most of the 2000's than to introduce a brand new shade of green.

 

Kelly green can be a great color, and it's a shame that it virtually disappeared from sports somewhere in the mid-90s, but I don't think there's a great need for an MLB team to wear it. The Eagles? Bring it back. The Jets? Maybe. But I think the A's look immeasurably better today than they did in the 70's and 80's.

 

I like forest green too, but the vividness of kelly green and athletic gold suits the Oakland A's on so many levels: baseball as summer sport, California, being untraditional.

 

Rays should be in columbia blue and forest green. Tar Heel baseball with green instead of navy, basically.

[kroywen]

38 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Rays should be in columbia blue and forest green. Tar Heel baseball with green instead of navy, basically.

 

I've always wanted this combo for the Rays. More or less what Tulane wears:

 

 

 

A seriously underused color combo in sports.

[Gothamite]

2 hours ago, SilverBullet1929 said:

But how did all these cities that we consider great baseball towns become great baseball towns? Seems like every great baseball town is just the ones that have had teams since the early 1900s more or less.

 

Where those cities clamoring for their teams a hundred years ago as well or does it take a hundred years to get to that point? 

 

Actually, that can have something to do with it. “Up and coming” markets often have trouble with new teams.  People moving in bring their allegiances with them, and those are hard to break.   Witness Tampa Bay, where local baseball fans put the Rays third behind the Yankees and Red Sox.  

 

Not to say that hip new markets can’t create fan bases.   But it can be harder than places with a higher percentage of natives.

 

[SilverBullet1929]

1 minute ago, Gothamite said:

 

Actually, that can have something to do with it. “Up and coming” markets often have trouble with new teams.  People moving in bring their allegiances with them, and those are hard to break.   Witness Tampa Bay, where local baseball fans put the Rays third behind the Yankees and Red Sox.  

 

Not to say that hip new markets can’t create fan bases.   But it can be harder than places with a higher percentage of natives.

Especially with the internet and how fans all over the country can follow any team from anywhere this is generally gonna be a problem forever. In theory you can't put a new team anywhere where they'll be openly accepted by an entire city. Any major city that can get a team in the future already has baseball fans there who root for other teams. 

[Scrumptious Ham]

Very minor league like. However, I'm a sucker for that Maryland design.

[Gothamite]

That is a problem we’ve seen in both Phoenix and Florida. 

[SilverBullet1929]

10 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

That is a problem we’ve seen in both Phoenix and Florida. 

Any clue how it's gone in Colorado by comparison to Phoenix and Florida? 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

On 7/15/2018 at 10:34 AM, kroywen said:

I think the A's look immeasurably better today than they did in the 70's and 80's.

 

Oh, man, no way. 

 

The A's have been drab for too long, in terms both of the colour and the uniform style. The only reason I don't complain more about them is that we have teams like the Padres and Reds and Twins who are doing so much worse.

 

First, the colour. The bright shade of Kelly green was brought in by Finley, and should never have been dropped. Blame Billy Martin, who changed it to forest green.

 

But even those uniforms had one thing going for them: they had the A on the front. That is a team tradition that goes back to the  franchise's beginning in the A.L.'s first season of 1901.

 

 

 

 

The current wordmark is a remnant of the team's early years in Kansas City under Arthur Johnson.

 

The wordmark is not inherently bad; but it doesn't fit the team.  It needs to go.  As I mentioned, the A's should have an A on the front, not a wordmark.

 

They should wear the following:

 

home

(but in the lighter shade)

 

road

(but in the lighter shade; and with white pants)

 

alt (worn both at home and on the road)

 

The A's are the only team that should wear coloured jerseys; and they are also the only team that should wear white pants on the road.

 

 

[MilSox]

2 hours ago, SilverBullet1929 said:

But how did all these cities that we consider great baseball towns become great baseball towns? Seems like every great baseball town is just the ones that have had teams since the early 1900s more or less.

 

Where those cities clamoring for their teams a hundred years ago as well or does it take a hundred years to get to that point? 

I'd say the cities that got teams in the first round of relocation in the 1950s (Milwaukee, Baltimore, Kansas City) proved to do quite well as baseball markets.  I'd put Colorado in there too even though they didn't get a team for quite some time later. 

Ironically, two of those cities lost their initial teams because ownership overestimated how successful they would be based on market size alone... and we still haven't learned. Nowadays leagues cram teams into places where there's no real demand for them because television networks are dumb enough to overpay for coverage rights based on having a presence in big media markets... regardless of how little some of those markets actually care about their team.

[Gothamite]

32 minutes ago, NicDB said:

I'd say the cities that got teams in the first round of relocation in the 1950s (Milwaukee, Baltimore, Kansas City) proved to do quite well as baseball markets.  I'd put Colorado in there too even though they didn't get a team for quite some time later. 

Ironically, two of those cities lost their initial teams because ownership overestimated how successful they would be based on market size alone... and we still haven't learned. 

 

If you’re talking about the Braves you’re right.  Milwaukee lost the Braves because Perini sold to a Chicago-based ownership group, that thought the bigger Atlanta would deliver better television ratings and more ad revenue.  Had nothing to do with the existing fanbase or the market or the team itself.  It was all a presumption that bigger = better. 

[MilSox]

5 hours ago, Gothamite said:

 

If you’re talking about the Braves you’re right.  Milwaukee lost the Braves because Perini sold to a Chicago-based ownership group, that thought the bigger Atlanta would deliver better television ratings and more ad revenue.  Had nothing to do with the existing fanbase or the market or the team itself.  It was all a presumption that bigger = better. 

Yes, Milwaukee and Kansas City.  Charley O was hell bent on owning a team on the West Coast under the presumption that the population would continue to explode.  It did, but not quite to the degree he predicted. Especially not in Oakland.

In hindsight though, who in their right mind would think Atlanta is a better baseball market than Milwaukee now?

[Gothamite]

1 hour ago, NicDB said:

In hindsight though, who in their right mind would think Atlanta is a better baseball market than Milwaukee now?

 

Not the Braves, if their new ballpark is any indication.   

[marlinfan]

Miami is a very damaged baseball market right now. Unlike any other time in the 25 year existence of the franchise. The stadium deal is still an enormous weight on the franchise. Blowing up the team last winter really took it to another level. It's going to take a long time to correct this. The Jeter group has been doing a lot of things to make Marlins Park a multi-purpose space for community events. They've also been repairing the relationship with local businesses. They got a lot of good publicity and fan support when they wore teal and black for a weekend. But in the end it will take 3-4 of sustained winning to put this team back on the map.

 

I really believe the franchise would have benefitted tremendously from Jorge Mas purchasing the team. He would have been the first true Miami majority owner. Someone that people could trust from a well-respected family with backgrounds people could identify with. It will be hard for Jeter to shed the NY carpetbagger coming down to Florida to tell us how everything up north was better look. 

 

 

 

 

[Gothamite]

20 minutes ago, marlinfan said:

I really believe the franchise would have benefitted tremendously from Jorge Mas purchasing the team. He would have been the first true Miami majority owner. Someone that people could trust from a well-respected family with backgrounds people could identify with. It will be hard for Jeter to shed the NY carpetbagger coming down to Florida to tell us how everything up north was better look.

 

If that’s really how they see Jeter, that’s on them and not him. The man is far more a Tampan than anything. 

[JTernup]

On July 15, 2018 at 2:37 PM, SilverBullet1929 said:

Any clue how it's gone in Colorado by comparison to Phoenix and Florida? 

The Rockies do very well in Denver, it's by far the most successful of any of the 90's expansion markets. 

This year the Rockies are drawing 36,832 per game and rank seventh in average attendance. They trail LAD, NYY, STL, SF, CHC and LAA, five of which are probably the premier teams in the league with World Series appearances in the last ten years and the sixth being the Angels who are still in the LA area. Comparing that to the Dbacks, Rays and Marlins they are averaging 10k more fans a game than Arizona and about 13k more per game than TB and MIA combined. The other 90's expansion teams haven't finished with a higher average attendance than the Rox since Arizona did it in 2005!

 

The Rockies haven't finished outside of the top 15 in attendance any season since making the World Series in 07 and are typically in the top ten.  All this has occurred in a time when the Rockies have played in 5 playoff games, winning one game, never winning their own division. Since 2007 (ten completed seasons). Each of these four teams have been similarly inept on the field over the last decade (with the exception of a few good Rays seasons) so you can't claim that it has to do with winning. The fact of the matter is that the Rockies in Denver are beloved and successful in a way that the Rays and Marlins never have been or never will be.