Here’s Good News For Baseball Fans Who Hate New MLB Jerseys

It appears MLB has finally come to its senses regarding the great uniform debacle of 2024.

ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported Sunday that the Major League Baseball Players Association distributed a memo to players notifying them the league intends to address complaints from players and fans regarding new jerseys and pants, announcing change is on the way.

The memo, according to Passan, indicated the changes will go into place at the latest by the start of the 2025 season, seemingly hinting it could happen sooner than that.

The memo unsurprisingly put Nike in the crosshairs after widespread negative reaction to the Vapor Premium uniform. The new kit was touted as being lighter and more breathable. That might technically be true, but the new look has been widely panned as, well, awful. Aesthetically, Nike changed the names on the back of jerseys, screen-printing in a smaller font. That font was also curved in a way that was uniform to every team in the league, a major change from past styles for various teams. There were other issues, too, like mismatched greys for road teams and weird sweat-related looks.

“This has been entirely a Nike issue,” the memo read, per Passan’s report. “At its core, what has happened here is that Nike was innovating something that didn’t need to be innovated.”

MLB’s willingness to pivot signals a departure from what commissioner Rob Manfred said as recently as spring training. Manfred largely dismissed early criticism of the jerseys, essentially saying people — especially baseball people — don’t react well to change before lauding the supposed benefits of the new jerseys.

“With baseball, any new initiative there’s going to be some negative feedback,” he said in mid-February, per SNY. “First and most important, these are Nike jerseys. We entered this relationship with Nike because of who they are and the kinds of products they produce. Everything they’ve done for us so far has been absolutely 100% successful across the board.”

But…

“The jerseys are different. They are designed to be performance wear as opposed to what has traditionally been worn … but they have been tested more extensively than any jersey in the sport. The feedback from the All-Star Game last year where the jerseys were worn was uniformly positive from the players.”

Per the report, the union indicated in its memo that it cautioned against the changes but added, “Unfortunately, until recently, Nike’s position has essentially boiled down to — ‘nothing to see here, players will need to adjust.’ “

Perhaps once MLB gets the jersey situation cleaned up, it can move on to umpiring.