A few random observations and opinions of mine about last night’s World Series opener in Kansas City, from a uniform and logo point-of-view, of course.
By far, the 2014 jersey and cap patch designs are the least interesting in the history of this patch. A simple wordmark, and nothing more, adorned the sleeves and caps of both the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants last night.
In the last few World Series’ the cap patch at least featured the Commissioner’s Trophy behind the event logo, it looked great, and it seemed like this fairly plain logo would have worked nicely in a similar arrangement.
This season the Postseason patch seems to be representing a more significant event than the World Series one does. It’s hardly an upgrade in the quality of the logo and certainly did not convey this round of the playoffs was any more important than the previous rounds… quite possibly the opposite.
The best in-game application of this years World Series logo may have been what they painted on the field of Kauffman Stadium, a version which does not appear in the official MLB style guides for the Series. It contained the wordmark logo we see everywhere else within a blue background with the text in white.
Still nothing to get exciting about but it’s still an improvement over what we’ve seen on caps and jerseys.
Finally, the Kansas City Royals were wearing a World Series patch for the first time in their franchise history. Their last appearance in the World Series (1985) pre-dated the practice of wearing a patch in the playoffs. World Series patches did not make their debut on the uniforms of the respective pennant winners until the 1988 Fall Classic when both the Oakland Athletics and Los Angeles Dodgers wore a patch. The 1987 Cardinals were the first to wear a patch, however their counterparts from Minnesota did not.
This leaves six active franchises to have never worn a World Series patch, they are the two teams to have never qualified – the Washington Nationals and Seattle Mariners, as well as teams who have not played in the Series since before 1988: Chicago Cubs (1945), Pittsburgh Pirates (1979), Milwaukee Brewers (1982), and Baltimore Orioles (1983).
We did a piece on the history of World Series patches back in 2012, give that a read here.
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Goin’ Green: A photo roundup of St Patricks Day 2013 Uniforms 
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Photos from St Patricks Day 2012
