The Yankees Want To Dress Like All The Other Baseball Teams

There’s no predicting which silly story will become the next unhinged national sociopolitical argument. It is clear how it happens—enough people pretend to be upset about it on television and social media that some other, softer-brained people get upset about it for real—but trying to guess which outrage will land is the new psychic Jenga, and not just because the concept of collapse is both implied and guaranteed. This is why the seemingly tossed-off story of the New York Yankees players who would like to wear the team’s navy batting practice jerseys as the first alternate road kit in club history is so rife with idiotic promise.

It’s not the story itself. The Athletic’s Brendan Kuty accurately (we presume) presented the facts as they exist, which are that players pitched the idea of alternate jerseys to the club. This is notable only because the Yankees are one of the last two teams in North American (and maybe any continent’s) sports to eschew the idea of a third jersey. (The other holdout is the MinnesOakLAOakAgainVegas Raiders, who have only diverged from tradition with their silver-numerals-with-black-trim version on the road whites, which they originally trotted out in the early 1970s and quickly scratched.)

The Yankees’ singular fashion statement is based on the time-honored couture philosophy of “No.” The home jersey has pinstripes and an entwined “NY” on the left side of the chest, the road jersey is gray and has “NEW YORK” across the front, there are no names on the back except for that of the company that makes the shirts, and it’s been that way with only the tiniest affectations since 1913. No changes, no alterations, not even advertisements until they inevitably cut an eleven-figure deal with some fly-by-night insurance operation. Every other team has not only embraced but actively become addicted to alternates, and as a result, the certifiably insane Chris Creamer’s SportsLogos site has become a compendium of the weirdest color palettes devised by history’s weirdest marketing experts, imagining the weirdest ideas for the weirdest teams’ players.

But now comes the fun part. Per Kuty, the decision on the alternates is likely going to be taken to owner Hal Steinbrenner, whose late father George became the very embodiment of stereotypical Yankee rigidity even as he perfected the concept of promoting the owner as the team’s highest purpose. On its face, this seems like a lost cause before it hits his desk, but Hal also eliminated the organization’s ban on facial hair, which his pop instituted and defended with Teutonic zeal in the name of radical rebranding, so it’s not a completely absurd ask from the players.

The fact that Yankees with facial hair did not upset the nation as a whole is not as surprising as you might think in a sport that televises Brandon Marsh’s extremely wet head on a daily basis; besides, that wasn’t a franchise invention but a Steinbrennerian one, so it wasn’t actually upholding a tradition as much it was one man’s shaving affectation. But the Yankees’ inviolable view on costuming is exactly the sort of thing that Our Bedlam President would seize upon as something worth loudly defending, if only because he has embraced sport as the only place where his brain lesions don’t show so much. That it doesn’t matter and no one really cares very much about it in no way precludes such a change from becoming a thing that people shout about for a few days.

The moment the Yankees come out in dark jerseys is a moment made for Trump’s particular version of Short Attention Span Theatre. Even as he sets the agenda for every news cycle, the man instinctively goes where the attention is, or at the very least where he believes it should go, and baseball is enjoying a brief mini-renaissance before the lockout that will make his anti-union skin rash glow Cincinnati red. This is, in short, the kind of dumb stuff he believes he can run on in an election year, and it arrives at a time when his polling numbers are running close to those of appendicitis. I mean, you can only fire a cabinet member a week for so long until you run out of cannon fodder, and UFC can’t come to the White House lawn twice a month.

But never mind the Dunderhead-In-Chief for a moment, as if that were possible. There is also a phalanx of deep-state traditionalists who hold up the Yankees as the last bulwark of tradition in the industry that invented alternate uniforms and even alternate nicknames, and which is still innovating in that space today. The Yankees are supposed to Stand For Something in the face of a world that is changing too fast for too many people; those people, who on balance are too upset to think straight, hold up George Steinbrenner as the last person to understand the virtue of constancy, which means that his son is required to decide whether the Yankees No Longer Stand For That Thing You Thought They Stand For. Taken altogether, it should make for a uproarious late-night séance in the Steinbrenner compound.

It may be, now that Kuty has spilled the beans on the new-look Yankees, that Hal backs away from this fight with the idea of his old man, or that he decides the shirt’s not worth the grief, or that he cannot bring himself to equate the team’s intransigent couture with the fact that it hasn’t won a World Series in 17 years, which is its longest run without a championship since they were Highlanders. It may also be that by the time Hal decides to give in to the players’ whim on this, the rest of the country will be too locked into its own despair to give a damn, or that the owners will close the shop before it ever happens, or that the midterm elections have rendered the Trump presidency paralytic. The possibilities are multiple, and every one of them is dumber than the last. We can’t wait. Make this happen, Hal, and make it stupid while you’re at it.