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DRESSED TO THE NINES: THE FASHIONS OF BASE BALL
TEAMS ARE SPORTING ALL MANNER OF DIFFERENT LOOKS GOING INTO THE 1871 SEASON

[NOTE: I made all uniforms shown below in a two-step process. I create most of the jersey in a Photoshop template whose author I can no longer remember thanks to it having been moved across multiple laptops. From there, I use EriqJaffe’s excellent Uniform Maker app – the thread for which is here and can be downloaded from here – to import & finish off the jersey before working on other elements of the uniform. The stripes for the Tiger Social Club jersey are something I custom-made myself because I wanted something more than pinstripes to represent “Tiger”, so if you download the Uniform Maker those won’t be in there. I imported a number of local fonts form my laptop to create team fonts – a function available in Uniform Maker – should I wish to use them in the future.

Everything shown is part of a total overhaul I did of team uniforms to finally get them into the new format, and I’ve uploaded them into my public OneDrive folder, which should be available without password here.]

NORTHEASTERN U.S.A. (Mar. 13, 1871) - Now that the formation of the American Professional Baseball League has increased the roster of organized baseball clubs to an even sixty, the teams that take to the field of play are going out to compete in an ever-increasing range of sporting uniforms.

During the early days of organized games around the New York metropolitan area during the 1840’s & early 1850’s, it was standard for a team’s players to don a white shirt with a full collar, woolen trousers with leather belts, shoes with plated cleats attached to the soles, and straw hats to block out the sun.

The most distinctive feature of a club team’s uniform during this time was the “Shield-front Jersey”, a shirt that had a shield featuring the club’s emblem fastened to it via buttons and stitching. The inspiration for the Shield-front was the standard-issue uniform of metropolitan fire brigades, as many of the original members of Knickerbocker at its founding in 1845 were volunteer firemen themselves. It remains unknown why, then, the Knickerbocker men of 1849 chose navy blue and not bright red as their main color.

The Shield-front soon became the dominant shirt among organized clubs, and at the founding of the NBBO in 1857 nearly every one of the sixteen metropolitan clubs wore one as did many of the other clubs in the competition. However, the look of the average baseball man is no longer limited to a shirt, a shield, pants, and a large hat. Teams now wear multiple different styles of shirt, caps have replaced hats as the preferred headgear of players, and full-length pants have given way to less restrictive knickers, which, in turn, has led to the introduction of distinctive stockings as a baseball uniform accessory.

And with that, a look into the different fashions that will be worn by teams in the upcoming 1871 season.

First up: the classics. Many teams still employ the Shield-front jersey, and among those shirts there are three common types of shield used. Who better to display those than three of the oldest clubs in the sport: Gotham, Knickerbocker, and Mutual?

While the above represents the types of shields used by most of the shield-bearing teams, some have developed their own distinctive shield styles that involve the use of their own club's insignia. Below, the shirts of Empire, Lancastra Britannia, & Mercury demonstrate a unique way to affix a club’s identity to the front of their shirt:

While the white Shield-front remains extremely popular, there are plenty of teams that see fit to take to the field in a different fashion. The most common way teams do this is with a solid-color shirt, shown here by players from Flour City, Green Mountain, Lake Erie, & Sons of the Ocean.

Other teams have decided to start using their shirts as reminders of who & where they represent. A number of the clubs of Upstate New York, as well as clubs elsewhere in the Northeast, have the place they’re named after stitched across the front of their shirts. The teams showing off their distinctive looks here are Maryland, Portland, Syracuse, & Utica.

Shirts aren’t the only way teams differentiate themselves on the field of battle. Since the cap began to replace the straw hat in the middle of the 1850s, teams have created multiple variations to their headgear in an effort to stand out. Nearly every cap in existence has a striping pattern of some sort, and among those the three most common variations are the “Single Band Box”, the “Double Band Box” and the “Soutache”, which are demonstrated below by American, Kings County, & Marathon.

However, it is the clubs of Boston and nearby Cambridge in Massachusetts who have developed the most unique-looking caps, thanks to the “Boston Stripe” pattern shown off here by Cantabrigians, Massachusetts Bay, & Shamrock.

Although the full-length baseball pants have given way to shorter knickers, nearly every team still dons the color white below their shirt, so that means that stockings are the other main area in which a team may stand out from its rivals. Unlike other parts of the uniform, there are no styles of stocking that are popular above all others, and that means a spectator may see all different manner of looks below the knee. Here, Alleghany, Excelsior, Niagara, & Orange show off four of the many different variations of stocking worn on the field.

Still, one style of stocking reigns unique above all others. Continental is one of the only clubs whose identity makes use of four different colors – black, gold, green, & white – and because of that they decided the only way to incorporate those colors below the knickers was in a way completely different from everyone else: Argyle socks!

And yet, it is not Continental who will be sporting the most unique look of all for 1871. One of the new members of the NBBO, Tiger Social Club, decided that not only did their club name need to be reflected in what they wear but as part of that the traditional white knickers & pants had to go. This makes for a uniform that no other team will be able to compete with in terms of sheer uniqueness.

One further development on the uniform front: during the Spring Rules & Regulations Meetings, Knickerbocker president Doc Adams proposed the idea of using the currently blank back of the shirt as a way to identify players. His argument was that large numbers on the back of each jersey could be used to mark individual players, and then those numbers and players could be listed in game programs so spectators would know for sure who each player was out in the field. Adams believed adopting the practice would increase fan knowledge and program sales in the concourses.

How Adams’ prototype numbered jersey looked:

The proposal was given some consideration, but in the end was soundly defeated as other clubs’ executives didn’t see the need for a method by which players could be identified from afar. One could argue it was a crazy idea, but one could also argue that perhaps Adams was thinking well into the future.

As the players of baseball take to the field this spring & summer, there will be no shortage of unique fashions on display for the spectators. Even those watching from beyond the fences of the deepest outfields will be able to tell one team from the other!