The Sports Hub: Be Who You Are

As a pretty big baseball fan I follow an ESPN blog called the 'sweetspot'. This blog keeps you informed on what is happening around the league. In early august, baseball analyst Steve Berthaiume posted about baseball uniforms. In it he put all 30 baseball teams into three categories based on their uniforms/logo. They were The Traditionalists, Those on the Cusp and The Offenders. Here is the intro.

"Bill Parcells once said, "You are what you are," meaning that if your football team's record is 8-8, whatever circumstances you'd dealt with didn't really mean anything; in the end you were a .500 team. It sounds depressingly pessimistic but the attitude is actually something out of a Zen koan; it strips away attachment and perception and zooms in on the core of what you are. That's more of a performance issue but it gets us pointed in the general direction of baseball uniforms.

For that topic, I prefer this: Be who you are. This speaks more about identity in regard to baseball franchises; more specifically the marketing and branding of each team's personality. Be who you are. By that I mean more than just a discussion of which uniforms you like best. This runs a bit deeper. Because fans, more often that not in my experience, have strong connections to a team's particular logo or color choice, the uniforms those teams wear represent a traditional identity, the inner layer of the core.

Too many franchises have become lost in the marketing jungle. In an effort to be current or edgy some teams are sporting homogenized, corporate colors and logos that seem to deny their histories and traditions. A few might have had logos that were at one point considered hokey or outdated. I say, embrace the hokey. Wear it with pride. All thirty teams have colors and logos that represent their one genuine identity with which fans connect. There is a reason why I see so many fans walking around wearing old hats with former logos. There is a reason those who market the game seem to try and manufacture nostalgia at every turn. It's because we've lost some of it in a haze of generic logos or poorly conceived alternate jerseys which only seem to admit that a much larger mistake was made in the first place. Be who you are.

Here's a list, a subjective one to be sure, of those who embrace their true identities and carry on tradition by wearing them proudly and those who have lost their way and hopefully will soon hear their true selves calling from an overlooked closet in a back room somewhere."

Our local team, the Toronto Blue Jays were put on the "Offenders" list with only the Mets, Brewers, Astros and Padres.

"The Blue Jays. Everyone on the team should be dressed like Ernie Whitt or Garth Iorg. Toronto won two World Series with its old Blue Jay bird logo and the light blue and white colors with the split lettering. Be who you are. Their current look is awful. Joe Carter jumped around the bases in a unique and classic look that needs to be brought back. When I look at Jose Bautista wearing number 19 at the Rogers Centre I should see Otto Velez at Exhibition Stadium."

This really made me think. I grew up with the newer Blue Jays logo's and never really thought of going back to the classic uniforms we wore in our glory days. This week the Blue Jays made the change.