The San Francisco Giants made it official yesterday that they will be adding player names to the back of their home cream jerseys for the 2021 season. News of the Giants plans had been reporated as far back as this past August.
This will be the first time the team has worn player names on the back of their home uniform since the 1999 season, their final year at the old Candlestick Park. For 2000 the club tweaked their uniforms as they entered the new ballpark, one of those changes included a more traditional turn to nameless uniforms.
Reaction to this news appears to be mostly negative from Giants fans on social media, but then again social media tends to be mostly negative regardless, so who really knows. Personally, I don’t mind the move based on the photos released by the team.
“We will have names on the back of jerseys and it’s been something we’ve been debating for years,” Giants VP of business operations Mario Alioto said to KNBR radio over the weekend.
Kerry Crowley of The Mercury News transcribed Alito’s story which he shared during that radio appearance explaining the origin of the change:
“There was a dad and his son and one of the players came out and he was so excited and the son said, ‘Dad, look it’s one of the Giants players, and the dad said, ‘Do you know who that is?’ The son said, ‘Yeah, it’s No. 8’ So he didn’t even know his name. It’s part of what we need to do to introduce our game to a whole new generation of fans. I know there’s many folks and I’m one of them at times that’s a traditionalist and we go back to the old days of baseball, but I think we also need to be cognizant of introducing the game to a new generation of fans.”
It’s expected that this move will also apply to the team’s orange and black alternate jerseys which had also been nameless in recent seasons. This leaves the New York Yankees (home and road), Boston Red Sox (home and home alternate), and Seattle Mariners (home alternate) as the only clubs to wear a jersey without a name in 2021.
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