Some final thoughts on the ridiculously bad Players Weekend uniforms

This is going to be a full article on the topic of the ridiculously awful white and black Players Weekend uniforms, clearly thought of and designed by someone who had never actually attended a baseball game, but New York Times national baseball writer Tyler Kepner sums up the weekend in one sentence:

The idea for these appears to have been inspired by the single-color uniforms worn by NBA teams several Christmas Days ago (these are from 2012):

Photo by Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images

The thing is, an average MLB field is about 100,000 square feet. The average NBA court: 4,700. If the point was to make the colorful shoes worn by baseball players more visible, that’s not really possible on such a large field where a lot of the players are wearing pants that cover the top of the shoes. On an NBA court, the shoes are much more visible, both in person and on television. And even those 2012 uniforms were difficult to read:

Tyler Kepner might not get his wish to see all the Players Weekend uniforms burned — though that would make a fun made-for-TV event! — but I am 100 percent certain that on Players Weekend in 2020, we will see MLB players wearing something with a different look.

To that end, Cubs manager Joe Maddon, who called this year’s uniforms “awkward,” had a really good idea for the design of next year’s uniforms:

“My take on it is they should every team design their own Players Weekend uniform. That would be cool.”

Maddon said teams should pick players to design a special uniform during the offseason, suggesting Jason Heyward, Anthony Rizzo and Jon Lester as the Cubs’ fashion designers.

“You style the Cubs uniforms, then it truly is Players Weekend,” he said. “I think you’d get a lot more interesting and better unigrams if you went that route.”

Now that’s a fantastic idea. Of course, they’d have to have certain guidelines re: logos and colors, but why not do this? Have players meet in the offseason, with final designs submitted during spring training. That would give the league more time to promote them, and I’ll bet players could come up with original and creative design thoughts. Like this, maybe:

For whatever it’s worth, we won’t see Players Weekend uniforms at Wrigley Field in 2020. Players Weekend should be scheduled the weekend after next year’s MLB Little League Classic in Williamsport. That event will happen Sunday, August 23, 2020, so Players Weekend will be August 28-30 next year. The Cubs will face the Mets in New York that weekend.

As your final view of this year’s monochromatic Players Weekend, Mike Bojanowski took my recap of Sunday’s game and re-did it in the black-and-white style of the uniforms. Enjoy. (Yes, it’s deliberately difficult to read.)