Spring Training is a time when reporters tell us which players are, in the hopes of bouncing back from a disappointing season, in the best shape of their lives. This year, however, every player might have showed up in the best shape of their life if they knew what was waiting in their locker.
As players reported to camp, videos and pictures surfaced across social media of noticeably cheap uniforms with oddly spaced font and pants so thin you can see through them and see…well…penis.
Fanatics, the hated sports merchandising company, took over the manufacturing of MLB’s uniforms in 2017. In 2020, Nike became the official uniform supplier for MLB. In other words, Nike designs the uniform and Fanatics makes the uniform. This off-season, Nike designed a lighter, more breathable uniform.
The change came at the cost of a clean, high-quality uniform. One such example is the loss of cross-stitched name and team fonts. The cross-stitching added a sense of elegance and detail to the uniforms; it also added extra weight that needed to be cut for a lighter jersey. A classic case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
When asked for an opinion on the new uniform, outfielder Taylor Ward answered, “It looks like a replica. It feels kind of like papery. It could be great when you’re out there sweating, it may be breathable. But I haven’t had that opportunity yet to try that out…So far, thumbs down.”
Although there are Little League teams that have better looking uniforms, the issue in and of itself isn’t the worst crime MLB has committed. It is, however, another sign of corporations making things lousier.
Reacting to the new uniforms, baseball writer Michael Baumann tweeted, “I'm mad about the Fanatics MLB jerseys because it's the lowest-stakes example of the thing that's sending me over the edge: An everyday thing is getting worse. Everyone knows it and hates it. It's one guy's fault and we know who it is, but there's nothing we can do to stop it.”
That’s the point. As the profit-makers of our world continue to extract every ounce of value from the commodities they sell, we—the general public—suffer. In a recent Defector article, David Roth wrote about Boeing and its history of chasing profit over safety: “the blank nihilism of financial capitalism's profit-driven imperatives is familiar by now; management's quest to see how much more cheaply an increasingly poor product can be sold at the same price and under the same name as what came before is, at bottom, the story of basically every industry or institution currently in decline or collapse”. While a chintzy uniform might not be as dangerous as a faulty airplane, this fundamental principle of corporate decision-making is the real story at play in MLB’s latest debacle.
In the 1980’s, movie producer Don Simpson proclaimed, “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money.” Karl Marx couldn’t describe capitalist enterprise any better. MLB, Fanatics, Nike—none of them are obligated to provide us with a quality product. Their sole endeavor is to wring as much capital out of their product as possible—whatever the means—even if the labor creating that capital is running around in “papery” uniforms.
And for those who are interested, you can purchase an authentic jersey for $400+.
Photos via Getty Images