Clashing Pinstripes
September 7,
2008 | Kevin
Zdancewicz
I played on the Diamondbacks in
my
local Babe Ruth baseball
league when I was fourteen and fifteen years old, and while we used the
black snake
hats, I
actually
own one of the white hats pictured in this week’s featured uniform. But
the
white hat itself is not the real reason for bringing up Arizona’s 1998
look;
it’s more for the brilliant idea of pairing
the
pinstriped
jerseys with plain white hat (that’s sarcasm, folks). Pinstripes
have long
been a tradition in the MLB, going back to at least 1907,
but it’s never a good look to wear a hat with a solid crown when your
white
jerseys have pinstripes. That clash was part of a rather expansive
uniform
package for the expansion Diamondbacks. While the original designs and
multiple
hats were a little much, they settled into a single home and a single
road
design and toned down some of the craziness by the second year of the
organization’s existence.
Maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise that Arizona would go with the clashing
white-and-pin stripe look as it was really only the start to an
interesting
uniform progression for the Diamondbacks. For example, what other team
features hats
that
were worn
so
infrequently, that this
is probably
the best game photo available of them? Or used a helmet
design
for
only one season when it didn’t even exist as a hat? Throw in the
jersey/hat mismatches
and the
fact that the team was the only purple-clad baseball team before
changing its
colors last
year, and the Diamondbacks undoubtedly have had one of the most
frantic and
noteworthy uniform histories in recent memory.
Most of the links in this column go to a
site
devoted
Diamondbacks uniform history and features photos of virtually every
Arizona
uniform combination to date, which is impressive given that there have
been so
many jerseys in the franchise’s brief eleven
year existence. The gem of the lot is a shot of the
Diamondbacks’
1999 Turn Ahead the Clock jersey. I talked about the MLB future jerseys
in a
previous column and wished that we could see what Arizona’s wrap-around
snake
uniforms would look like with names and numbers. Well, I got
my wish.
Pretty
crazy right? Now, if we could just figure out what was on the hats…
(Update:
I recently got a couple new photos of the Diamondbacks' white hats with pinstriped jerseys.
Check them out.)
Photo Courtesy of Andrew Thomason
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