Source: Marlins looking to dump teal in favor of orange

[Schilly]

A couple of things here....There are 2 main varieties of Marlins...a BLue Marlin and a Black Marlin. Both offer tones of tealish blu/green on their sides fading to near black along the Dorsal fin.

Dropping teal in favor of Orange would be like the Bengals dropping orange in favor of Teal. Not that a teams color has to be relative to the color of it's mascot...but if it's already established. Orange as an accent would be fine. Orange and Teal scream Miami, but I can't see htem dropping black.

[Artmanc3po]

While I kind of like the new D-backs look, it still smells like Your Arizona Diamondastros. Are we going to have Your Miami Giant Orioles? Even though I think the Giants and Orioles look distinct from one another, I can't envision an entirely black-n-orange Marlins set that looks different enough from the other two to matter.

[BallWonk]

While I kind of like the new D-backs look, it still smells like Your Arizona Diamondastros. Are we going to have Your Miami Giant Orioles? Even though I think the Giants and Orioles look distinct from one another, I can't envision an entirely black-n-orange Marlins set that looks different enough from the other two to matter.

I don't know about that. To my eye, color choice is less important when it comes to team distinctiveness (or similarity) than things like color balance, shapes, and so forth. Yeah, the D-Backs now wear basically the same colors as the Astros. But honestly, I think the D-Backs home uniform looks more like the Nationals than it does like the Astros. All the other details -- pinstripes or not, black caps versus red caps, lettering style, sleeve piping, etc. -- are just more significant in defining each team's look that simple color choice.

Which is why I don't worry that the black-and-orange Marlins will look too much like the Giants. They won't, at least not without a radical change. It will depend on whether the Fish keep their black pinstripes and swooshy-lettering, and on whether they keep black caps. But the Giants aren't basically a black-and-orange team. They're a black team with a little orange, and mainly they're defined now by their very plain jerseys with block letters in an arc. Assuming no top-to-bottom uniform re-do, the Marlins will be defined more by their pinstriped jerseys with more or less flat, script-ish lettering. With black and orange swooshy-underlined lettering, the Marlins will be in much greater danger of looking like the Orioles South than like the Giants East.

Orange caps would go a long way toward preventing either outcome, though the black-and-orange scheme would still be wrong for Miami. Come to think of it, black and orange with pinstriped uniforms would have me worried about too closely resembling the Mets than either the Orioles or the Giants -- changing to look more like a division rival is the one unforgivable sin of baseball uniform design. The Marlins changing to look more like the Orioles is just dumb. But making it easier for the casual fan to mistake them for the Mets (or anyone else in the NL East) would be deeply wrong.