There was a time when spring training jerseys seemed like an afterthought. Glorified batting practice jerseys in many cases made to look all the worse by comparison when some teams wore them while others, at least for home games, wore their full regular-season style jerseys.
In the past few years, however, MLB and its merchandising partners have made a pretty big effort to improve the design of these things, both in terms of materials and in terms of aesthetics. Of course a big reason for this is to make it so that fans would want to buy their own versions and/or replicas of the spring training togs, but this is America, dang it, and that’s just what we do. They’ve done it to pretty uneven degrees over the years, truth-be-told. For every decent spring training design there have been some bad ones and regular season uniforms are still way better.
This year, however, the designs have taken a great stride forward. Really, most of them look pretty darn sharp. I’m not a fan of patches on the sides of caps as I think it creates an unbalanced effect, but the little highway sign-style shield is nice looking. Some of the individual team designs, particularly the White Sox, are sharper than sharp.
Go here for a slide show of all of the spring jerseys. Or, so see them all cycle through, check out these tweeted pics:
Cap off your new-and-improved 2016 #SpringTraining ensemble with @NewEraCap. pic.twitter.com/CcwShrj0wy
— MLB (@MLB) January 28, 2016