Another Astro color thread

[Gothamite]

Me, too.

The logo and uniforms are obviously left over from "South Texas Railmen" or whatever they were going to call themselves.

[BallWonk]

I have no problem at all with the current basic design the Astros wear - if the team was still named the Colt .45s, we'd be proclaiming it possibly the best design in baseball.

But for a team called the Astros that has been traditionally linked to up-to-the-second, space-age imagery? Better the team should have been renamed with the move to the new field. (To fit in with Enron Field, they could have been the Pension Rustlers, or maybe the Absconders).

When, exactly, did the Astros look "up-to-the-second"? The pre-rainbow uniforms with the shooting star looked a lot more like a cowboy movie poster from the '40s than anything "space age." And even in the late 1970s, everyone knew just how dated the rainbow uniforms were. They looked like all the leftover Bicentennial stuff that by '78 already had the feel of detritus from a long-forgotten age. ("Ah, big poofy letters and Peter Max colors. How ... quaint.") And they kept wearing that tired look, and then a variation on it, until 1993. The rest of us were getting e-mail accounts and Houston still looked like the Captain and Tenille.

In 1994, the Astros did finally adopt uniforms that might qualify as "space agey" or "futuristic." Except that by then the very notion of looking like the space age was hopelessly dated. In 1994, the United States had lost the ability even to send astronauts beyond the fringes of the atmosphere. Twenty-five years earlier, we were sending men to the moon and back, but by the 1990s the best we could do was the equivalent of driving a truck from Houston to Dallas, straight up. Plus, aside from the hopelessly non-futuristic concept of a space-related identity in the first place, the team adopted blue and gold as colors. The difference between an astronaut and a little old grandma on her way to visit the grandkids in Bemidji? When the astronaut looks out his window, the sky is black. Grandma's window is blue. If you look around and you see blue, then you are by definition not in space.

Which is why I think the current Astros set is more in keeping with the team's name than anything they've yet worn. Yeah, it has a kind of retro vibe. So does NASA. But the colors at least are right: Black, for space. Deep red, for rocket exhaust and Mars and Jupiter and supermassive prenova stars and whatnot. Gold (well, the color of tan you use to represent gold if you don't have metallic gold on hand), for the twinkling of all those other non-supermassive prenova stars and for the astronauts' visors and so forth. Plus, that's just a very nice script the Astros wear, actually quite modern in its letterforms and line. (Why the assumption that there will be no script in the future, and that any script is therefore necessarily "retro"? Are we all going to lose our arms or something, so we won't be able to use pens, and then the voice-recognition computers we all use once we've lost our arms will only display italic sans-serif fonts with weird angles? Of course they'll have script team lettering in the future. And it will look a lot more like the Astros than the Dodgers.)

When you ask the objective questions, "What color is space? What color is the stuff in space?" the answers are not blue and they're not three shades of orange. The Astros current colors look a lot more like space and the stuff in space than anything the team has ever worn before.

Perhaps the real problem is just the names the Astros gave to their colors. Instead of "brick" and "sand", which are just about the last two things that will ever be put on board a spaceship of any kind, the team should simply have called its colors "Mars" and "Venus" or "Propellent" and "Moon rock" or something not quite so disrespectful to the team's identity.

[TruColor]

Maybe they should've made THIS guy the mascot:

(I LOVED that cereal as a kid)

[leopard88]

Mmmmm, Qwisp!!!

[swisherHOU]

Take away the pinstripes, and their current uniforms are perfect.