Well, one of us is going to have to change…
Less than 48 hours after their glorious throwback to the colourful 1979 season, the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners did a complete 180 for Sunday’s series finale.
The visiting Mariners opted to wear their navy blue alternate uniforms with matching cap and grey pants, the host Astros wore their usual Sunday home alternate uniform: an orange cap with white pants and… a navy blue jersey.
No, Major League Baseball does not have a rule about teams wearing the same colour jersey in a game. Keep in mind it happens all the time during Spring Training, and players seem to have no issue with it during the month-plus of that.
Going through the seven seasons we’ve been running our MLB Uniform Tracker we could find six games in which both teams wore the same coloured jersey. I don’t just mean royal blue vs powder blue, we’re talking the same colour here – navy blue vs navy blue, red vs red, and even a couple white vs white.
What’s kinda interesting here? Half of these same colour matchups are between the Astros and Mariners.
A look back starting with Sunday’s game and moving back from there:
There are a few earlier examples that pre-date our tracker that I could think of, a Royals-Blue Jays game in which both teams wore their alternate royal blue jerseys in 1995 came to mind. Any others that you can think of? (The Cubs-Indians World Series was royal vs navy) Share in the comments.