The Los Angeles Dodgers' spectacular and mostly uncontested offseason binge buy has provided for conspiracy theorists just as surely as it has for Dodgers fans. The benefit to the latter, who have seen the defending champs add a two-time Cy Young Award winner and a vaunted international free agent, among many others, is not hard to figure. Conspiracy types, for their part, can look at the Dodgers’ power moves and see the angle that MLB owners will play in their next attempt to finally install a salary cap. Their historic outlay for Shohei Ohtani a year ago made perfect sense because they just won the World Series; that they would continue trying to get better seems, to some, uncouth. In raising their tax payroll by $110 million in two years the Dodgers are now raising suspicions that they are cravenly buying up all the people there are in the game, and ruining baseball, and blah blah blah.
Well, maybe, but what if all this is actually a move toward legitimizing the Dodgers' recent history? Even allowing for their dominance in the marketplace and their roll to victory in October, the Dodgers have not yet won a championship 1) in a complete season (they won the 2020 bubble title), or 2) while wearing actual major league uniforms since 1988.
We mention that last bit because Nike and MLB have apparently walked back their shitty-uniforms-are-just-as-good-if-we-say-they-are stance of a year ago, when the 30 MLB teams were outfitted as shoddily as they have since the 1940s, back when the pants were flannel and could comfortably house a regulation-sized player in each pantleg. Those uniforms looked cheap, were occasionally worryingly translucent, and shredded on first slide. The players hated the uniforms, and the fans hated buying the Fanatics replicas of those jerseys. (Fanatics is a genuinely separate problem that reminds us that "let the buyer beware" is not just an old saying but a scream in the customer's face.)
But now the fix is finally in after a year of MLB baseball being played in uniforms that landed somewhere between hand-me-down chic and Shein-grade fast fashion disposability. In fact, when Nike's head of global grief-absorption Denis Nolan said, “We’re listening to the players and our fans; their input and opinions are important to us," the fact that he made it seem like the user experience was a brand-new concept that Nike just invented was a reminder that Nike and MLB would like credit for both the repair and the original blunder. They even called the rollout of the new quality duds a "remediation schedule," which for all its Superfund vibe is finally just a loftier version of claiming victory in appalling defeat—a Super Bowl winner's ring for the Kansas City Chiefs.
The repair, which for some reason isn't going to be ready for home uniforms until 2026, supposedly includes the thicker pre-2024 fabric made by Majestic that actually holds up to breaking up double plays and diving catches in the outfield; jerseys will once again feature larger numerals, embroidered sleeve patches, and more professional-looking team fonts. There was no word on whether the MLB people who agreed to the Nike deal are going to be told that they urgently want to spend more time with their families, which would have been a more dramatic way of falling on the corporate sword. But the decision to break with the people who made the uniforms correctly smacks of the decision by Kentucky Fried Chicken to find a new supplier in its English restaurants in 2018; the problem there was that they had to close hundreds of outlets when the new chicken people couldn't supply them with, well, chicken. That adjustment needed only a few months to repair. The switch back to jersey manufacturers who can actually supply jerseys is going to take a year.
Uniforms may not seem like a big deal to you unless you're planning to either attend a game and want to see the names and numbers, or want to buy a gift for your baseball-loving offspring. But both of those things represent big money and aesthetics, which baseball cares deeply about, and in that order. The league may have ravaged the rulebook in hopes of re-normalizing the 2:40 game time, but the uniforms were a step too far, a step that would probably rip out the crotch at first stretch.
Of course we still don't know if the new old uniforms will actually be as good as the 2023 version; with most items of change the first new version tends to suck. It's not like Nike or MLB gets extra credit for screwing up something that wasn't broken just for a marginally better corporate deal. We should wait for spring training to see if Ohtani's first spring training game in Glendale results in him looking like David Banner halfway through turning into The Hulk. Fortunately, Dodger spring training begins today, so we should find out in short order the extent to which Nike has unfixed their infamous fix.
And the Dodgers can finally say they have put their $387 million worth of players into quality duds that will last 162-plus games. In the world of marketing, even ridiculous claims need to have gravity. Or, failing that, pants that you can’t see through.
