A fixture for many teams in the league throughout the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, vest uniforms turned out to be a quirky fad – but a few would still look great today.
For a sport that has been played in the United States since the Reconstruction era, baseball is a game famously filled with many traditions – with the history of the sport’s uniforms also originating as an old tradition.
Some of these practices still show up in today’s game. Home teams typically wear white uniforms, while many away teams still wear grey, a practice that originated to obscure the dirt on the uniforms as traveling teams typically weren’t able to do laundry on the road.
While the whites at home, greys on the road standard has been present throughout much of MLB’s history, uniforms have also differed over the years as certain trends dictated how a team wanted to look in a certain era.
The 1970’s saw the first widespread diversion from this tradition, which saw many teams adopt a powder blue or colored jersey to wear on the road, as opposed to the grey used for many years. This era also saw the increased prevalence of pull-over jerseys, which were in widespread use across the league throughout much of the ’70s and 1980’s before falling out of favor in the ’90s.
As teams returned to buttoned down jerseys with more traditional appearances as the ’90s began, a different trend began to emerge a few years later as teams began to adopt vest uniforms.
The concept is as goofy as it sounds like – players wear an undershirt, typically of a solid color with a shoulder patch, and then wear a vest uniform with the city or team name over the undershirt.
While the Cincinnati Reds were among the first to dive into the idea, vest uniforms were widespread by the turn of the century and stuck around for much of the 2000’s before most teams began to abandon them.
Although most teams did wear real vests, a few teams, such as the Anaheim Angels and Toronto Blue Jays, adopted to wear faux vests, with the undershirt and vest being combined into a single jersey.
During the 1990’s and 2000’s, the following teams wore a vest or faux vest uniform during at least one season:
- Toronto Blue Jays
- Tampa Bay Devil Rays
- Florida Marlins
- Chicago White Sox
- Minnesota Twins
- Kansas City Royals
- Cleveland Indians
- Cincinnati Reds
- Pittsburgh Pirates
- Los Angeles Angels
- Texas Rangers
- Seattle Mariners
- Arizona Diamondbacks
- Colorado Rockies
While most of these were ultimately pretty goofy-looking, here’s a look at the three I’d love to see back in action:
*All photos are courtesy of thekitarchive.com/baseball
1. Arizona Diamondbacks home vest
Perhaps the most memorable of the vest uniforms, it’s what the Diamondbacks were wearing when they won their unforgettable 2001 World Series championship while also standing out as a unique harmony of colors when it comes to MLB uniforms.
Entering the league in 1998 as an expansion team with a primarily purple-and-teal color scheme, the Diamondbacks had dabbled with a more traditional primary home uniform in their first three seasons that featured the team name on the jersey.
While this uniform was always used as an alternate from the beginning, it became the primary home uniform during Arizona’s championship run in 2001, being worn with a purple undershirt.
An incredibly unique look for a baseball team to sport, this jersey looks like 1999, embodying the timely popularity of teal while sporting an appearance that was appropriate for an expansion team – something unlike what anyone had seen on a baseball field before.
Although I do like the Sedona red and sand colors that are mixed into their jerseys today, there’s a lot of nostalgia both in Phoenix and across the country for these uniforms.
2. Cincinnati Reds home vest and black undershirt
The Reds were among the first teams to introduce a vest uniform in 1993, utilizing that style that was a play on their earlier uniforms until 1998. For the 1999 season, a new vest uniform was introduced that made black a significant part of the team’s color scheme, utilizing a black undershirt with the vest.
While the Reds would wear this same vest with a red undershirt as well, there’s something particularly nostalgic about the appearance with the black undershirt and two-toned red-and-black cap.
Forever connected to the era of Sean Casey, Ken Griffey Jr. and Adam Dunn, the Reds were not a competitive team while donning these uniforms – but they were far from a boring club to watch, with these uniforms specifically jogging memories for myself and likely many other NL Central fans who watched a lot of baseball in the early 2000’s.
The Reds held onto the vest uniforms until the 2007 season, when the team adopted the home uniform that they still primarily wear today, which also abandoned the pinstripes seen on the vest uniforms.
Though it would be strange for the Reds or any other team to bring back vests as primary home uniforms, these could make a fun throwback uniform for Cincinnati in the future.
3. Los Angeles Angels home vest
A solid white home vest worn with a red undershirt, the Angels’ vest uniforms provided the clean red-and-white look that the Reds vests couldn’t quite capture, while executing an appearance that other red-and-white teams like the St. Louis Cardinals or Philadelphia Phillies aren’t able to on a potential vest.
It doesn’t hurt that these vests, which were used as home alternates throughout the mid-to-late 2000’s, were synonymous with a competitive era in Angels history. Invoking memories of Vladimir Guerrero, Francisco Rodriguez and Torii Hunter, these uniforms were often accompanied by a backdrop of a sold-out Angel Stadium in what looked like one of the best atmospheres in the league at the time.
Unlike the Diamondbacks and Reds, who have both largely moved on from the logo and color scheme used in their vest uniforms, the Angels have largely stayed with the same color scheme and uniforms since switching to their current red-and-white look in 2002 – the same year they won their only World Series championship.
While it’s hard to see these returning on any sort of regular basis, they could make for a fun throwback uniform – especially with the 25th anniversary of the 2002 Angels looming next season.
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