The Cubs uniform has remained more or less the same for many years. Pinstripes at home, gray on the road. Alternate blues. But it wasn’t always like that.
Let’s dig into a few of the more interesting Cubs uniform quirks throughout history.
The Clown Costumes
In 1882, the White Stockings, later known as the Cubs, wore white stockings, and that is how you knew what team you were watching. The Leagues tried something radical that season, where all players (for every team) at a certain position wore a specific uniform top & matching cap. Everybody wore white pants, but each position wore a different shirt & cap. Cap Anson looked like a candy cane over at first base. Below is the key:
Catcher: red
Pitcher: light blue
First base: red & white stripes
MLB
Second base: yellow and black stripes
Shortstop: maroon
Third base: gray and white stripes
Left Field: white
Center Field: red and black stripes
Right Field: gray
Reserve: brown or green
The defining characteristic was the stockings. The Chicago White Stockings & Boston Red Stockings dressed as advertised. The Cleveland Blues wore dark blue. And so on. It was such a ridiculous thing (not to mention really uncomfortable in the heat), that it didn’t last the entire season. Baseball is better off; with Joe Maddon’s tendencies to move players around the diamond, there would’ve been mass confusion.
Front Pockets!
In the early 1900s up through 1905, the Cubs wore uniform tops which featured a pocket on the left breast. A few other teams were wearing pockets as well. Surely those pockets were used to hold index cards with detailed batter splits. They weren’t for batting gloves; those didn’t exist. Tinker, Evers & Chance turned their first double plays wearing pockets on the front of their uniform shirts.
Zippers!
From 1937-42, then again occasionally after World War II through the end of the 1950s, the Cubs wore zip-up uniforms. When Ernie Banks broke into the Majors in 1953, he was zipping up. Could you imagine Dave Kingman zipping up a jersey? How about Carlos Zambrano? Whether there were zipper-related injuries on head first slides, I’m not sure.
Reverse Pinstripes
For a while, during the 1970s & ‘80s, about half the teams wore powder blues on the road instead of grays. From 1978-81 the Cubs took it a step further, going with powder blue uniforms with white pinstripes. It was in these pajama-looking duds that Dave Kingman led the Majors in home runs in 1979.