Arizona D-Backs Announce Tweaks to Uniforms for 2017

The Arizona Diamondbacks heard you, loud and clear.

This past December the D-Backs unveiled a brand new set of uniforms, they were anti-tradition — from the dark grey (almost black) used for road tops and pants, to the gradient at the bottom of the pant legs fans and opposing players even were fairly consistent with their criticism. After all, if there’s one thing most ball fans can agree on it’s tradition.

Based on some of that feedback the Diamondbacks yesterday announced a series of tweaks to their uniforms.

The big change is the oddities on the pants, they have 100% been corrected. The half-stripe has been converted to a traditional full stripe running the entire length of the pants, the gradient at the bottom – it’s gone, completely, resulting in a much cleaner look.

Arizona Diamondbacks New Pants 2017 — Pant stripe now extends down entire leg, gradient at bottom removed completely

The composite graphic and additional photos published in the Arizona Republic show teal shoes paired with the home and road alternate teal set, so that could be something. As you can see above, the pants are far and away improved over 2016.

There are also minor tweaks to the colours used for the road alt. teal jersey, numbers on the front of the jersey are now teal with black trim, same goes for the player name on the back. Both changed to help improve visibility when being worn on the unusually dark top.

(UPDATE): There’s also a colour change to the name on the back of the standard road jersey, player names go from red to sand/beige. Pic here:

A side-by-side to show most of the changes announced by the team from 2016 to 2017:

Arizona Diamondbacks New Uniforms 2017 — Click on photo to zoom in

“We were listening to fans and players on the changes they wanted us to make,” Arizona Diamondbacks president Derrick Hall told the Arizona Republic. “We knew about a month into the season that we were going to end up making these changes.”

The Republic also went on to note that the appearance of the pants on the field did not look nearly as good as they did in the computer renderings.

Hall explained, “once you have it approved and you’re already manufacturing, you’re stuck for the year, we wanted to get to this offseason so we could make the changes.”

Kudos to the Diamondbacks for listening to their fans and correcting these minor issues quickly. We’ll see now if they end up keeping the dark grey tops into 2018, however we were told earlier this year by some DBacks players that we should only expect to see more road jerseys adopting this shade of grey in the future.

“I think they’re growing on people.”, shortstop Nick Ahmed told us in June, “The dark grey, I heard, was going to be with some other teams next year.”

If that’s the case the players certainly would embrace their roles as fashion trendsetters.

“It’ll be cool to look back and say I had a part in that, a little bit of the design, along with other players,” all-star first baseman Paul Goldschmidt said at the time. “I think that will be cool in the future.”