Seattle Mariners Drop Grey Unis for 2023, Navy Blue now Primary Road Jersey

The Seattle Mariners have dropped their road grey jerseys for the 2023 season, the club has confirmed to SportsLogos.Net. This will be the first time in nearly forty years that the Mariners’ main road jersey colour will be anything other than baseball’s traditional grey.

The move is due to Nike and Major League Baseball’s new policy for this season, which limits teams to just four jerseys (plus one City Connect). This was a problem for the Mariners, who in 2022 had six official jerseys in their rotation – home white, road grey, home fauxback cream, alternate navy blue, alternate “northwest green” (teal), and Spring Training powder blue.

A tough position to be in but the M’s made the difficult decision to remove two; the road greys and the Spring powder blues were getting the axe.

***Navy blue is the new primary road jersey colour for the Seattle Mariners***

“When Nike/MLB made the move to a maximum of four jerseys per club, we were required to reduce our jersey set by two,” explained Senior Vice President, Marketing & Communications Kevin Martinez in an email to SportsLogos.Net. “Based on player and fan feedback, we eliminated our powder blue jersey, which we have worn in Spring Training, and our grey jersey.”

The Mariners will instead wear their navy blue jerseys as their primary road jersey this season; the Northwest Green (teal) jerseys are also available to be worn on as an alternate jersey on the road. While the grey jerseys are gone, the grey pants will continue to be worn during road games. The Mariners will go with Northwest Green for Spring Training instead of the powder blues.

A couple of surprising things here — first, the four plus one policy which we first heard about last week, is more than a mere suggestion and is apparently being strictly enforced, and second, the Spring Training jerseys count towards that four plus one limit.

Seattle joins the San Diego Padres as the only MLB teams to have officially listed a non-grey jersey as their primary road uniform (the Padres list their brown tops as their official road uniform). It’s been reported that the Tampa Bay Rays will also not wear a grey uniform in 2023, and though my reliable sources have corroborated this report, the team has told me the greys aren’t going anywhere. So… we’ll see.

***Ichiro wearing Seattle’s road grey uniform during a game in Toronto in 2008***

The Seattle Mariners wore powder blue pullovers on the road when they first joined the American League in 1977; they continued to wear powder blue through three uniform re-designs before switching to grey pullovers in 1985. Grey button-up jerseys were first introduced in 1987 and continued on as the team switched to their current navy blue, silver and northwest green colour scheme in 1993.

Seattle’s navy blues made their in-game debut in 1997 as a batting practice jersey that got the call to take part in a handful of regular season games – they’ve been around ever since with the changes coming to the front of the jersey as it alternated from “MARINERS” to “SEATTLE” several times over those 25 years, the current version of the jersey was first worn in 2012.