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Not every labor win has to wait for bargaining. Take the recent issue with MLB’s uniforms, for instance: in short, they’re terrible, and now they’ll be fixed. The when of that is a bit more up in the air — according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, it’ll be early 2025 at the latest — but hey. The players won, despite the defense of MLB this spring basically being a gaslighting, “no, we’ve always been able to see your balls.”
It’s not just that the fabric was see through, either. Pants and tops didn’t match. The lettering on the jerseys was small, and looked like it belonged on children’s replica jerseys. The pants would rip at seemingly the drop of a hat. The supposedly breathable fabric of the new-style jerseys resulted in a lot of pictures of players absolutely dripping with sweat from games played during the coldest part of the season. It was all a terrible experiment in… well, in who knows what, really. The kind of innovation companies always looking to make more money or cut costs play around with, that results in messing with what already works in a way that makes it worse? The Google, if you would. Nike didn’t need to do any of what they did here, with the players even warning them they didn’t like the directions they were taking, and yet, here we are.
Continue reading “MLBPA picks up a win, awful uniforms will see changes”