Listen up, baseball dreamers. Your help is needed. Right now, if you picked a fairy-tale title for South Florida's fairy-tale expansion dream, it would have to be: The Emperor's New Clothes.
We have a great market. We have a great owner. We have a stadium, which is good for baseball but not great. And we have...
No clothes? No clothes. Or maybe you didn't hear. Baseball said this week it wants each of the six expansion-seeking cities to send team uniforms to the league meetings in mid-June. That way, when the winners are picked, their uniforms can be held up for the cameras and go on sale around the baseball world.
Except our expansion group doesn't have a uniform design. And it will have to scramble to get one by the meetings. This isn't unique. Only Washington (Nationals) and Orlando (Sunrays) have nicknames, much less uniforms, and maybe if Orlando had taken more time it could have even picked a good nickname.
So how can you help South Florida's plight? By being a concerned citizen. By giving more than you take. By feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, encouraging the...
Oops, wrong soap box. You can help by drawing the team's uniform as you want it. Just turn to Page 13C and follow the instructions in my Dress The Team Contest.
There's no guarantee your uniform actually will be used (it probably won't). And there's no certainty it will be printed in the paper (some will be in a couple of weeks). But if yours is printed, you'll be sent the eventual team's shirt -- if we get a team.
What do you do? Well, there's no nickname, so you'll have to pick one. There are no colors and no insignia, so you'll have to pick them.
You can design it. You can have your children color it. You can have your school class draw it. You can put paint on your dog's paws and have him walk over it.
LET'S DRESS FOR SUCCESS
Please don't misconstrue this as just a fashion contest. Uniforms, everyone believes, have a lot to do with a team's performance and also have a direct effect on the psychological well-being of players and fans. Most everyone cares how they look in a uniform (Yankees manager Stump Merrill is a notable exception).
Steve Garvey once said he felt like a taco in San Diego's old brown-and-gold uniforms, and, sure enough, he had some off-years there, not fathering a single child while a Padre. Fred Lynn called Baltimore's caps, which had the cartoon Oriole on it, "the hat with the funny little duck on it." It was soon changed.
Then there was the Chicago White Sox mix-and-match disaster that got Bill Veeck some publicity. But they weren't uniforms. They were costumes. They had collars. Collars?
So what makes a good baseball uniform? Sometimes it's the obvious things, like the Yankees' pinstripes. And sometimes it's the subtle things, like the red number on the front of the Dodgers' blue-lettered shirts. Sometimes it's a traditional look, like ye olde fashioned D on Detroit uniforms, and sometimes it's a new design, like the Phillies' logo with the baseball in the P.
In other words, whatever works.
ERRORS IN FASHION
Perhaps it's easier to say what you should stay away from in your designs. Here are the five worst uniforms in baseball:
1. Houston Astros. This shows you that a bad uniform is like radiation poisoning. Once it's there, you can't get rid of it. Houston has altered its look from those funky, multi-striped uniforms that its players cried made them look like "human popsicles." Still, they haven't changed enough to make people forget. They still play like popsicles, too.
2. Toronto Blue Jays. Fine colors. Fine logo. But can anyone read their numbers? Rather than a solid number, it is composed of different lines, running together, so that a 9 looks like an overview of the I-95 Cloverleaf.
3. New York Mets. As Dwight Gooden once said, "We look like a bunch of softball players. Too many colors."
4. Chicago Cubs. Pajamas. Sorry, but pinstripes don't work with that wide, dark waistband. Traditional. But pajamas.
5. San Diego. New uniform. Still tacos.
Oh, one final suggestion for your design: Stay away from collars.