Browns Unveil New Unis; Should the Cleveland Indians Be Close Behind?
By Jason Stout
The Browns unveiled new uniforms Tuesday. Should the Indians think about following suit?
With all the hype and hullabaloo, not to mention the payoff only getting a 50 – 50 response, the Cleveland Browns unveiled new uniforms Tuesday night at a grand gala at the Cleveland Convention Center, complete with dignitaries walking an orange carpet.
Now that it's all said and done, Cleveland Indians fans can get back to the season that matters.
The organization made remodeling and redesigning Progressive Field a priority this offseason, and so far, the improvements appear to be a hit with fans venturing downtown to check it and the 2015 Indians out…all 20,000 (on average) of them. While attendance has been an issue for years at the venue once known for 455-consecutive sell outs, the season is young, and along with early injuries, the team isn't generating a lot of buzz–yet.
So, how can a team in this city generate said buzz? Well, it appears a good start is new uniforms and updated logos. I mean, it is the Browns we're talking about here. They haven't put a winning product on the field in ten years, yet still sell out nearly every home game. The Tribe, for the last two seasons, have had playoffs and almost playoffs, and national and local prognosticators believed this team was built to win this year. And they still can.
So what about those new unis?
Frankly, it really wouldn't be a bad idea. Though the team has yearly put out some sort of alternative jersey, usually to coincide with some milestone in team history, there has been nothing really new since the team moved in to the former Jacob's Field, all the way back in 1995.
This year, the update was making the navy blue a bit darker, and in all fairness, the first time they wore them on television, I thought they had switched to black. So, why would we want to change something that, at least to the team, must not appear to be broken? Here are a few reasons, just off the top of my head.
There are only six teams in all of Major League Baseball that don't wear a shade of red or blue. Join that club. Americana in America's Pastime is obviously overdone.
The script "Indians" looks like something straight out of the 90s. And the other word marks look like they're right out of their time periods on the alternates–because they are.
So we're supposed to be slowly but surely retiring Chief Wahoo, right? Granted, he's a part of nostalgia, but it doesn't change what he still represents to a growing (and angry) crowd of people…
That said, the block "C" is the most boring logo in all of baseball. It looks like a tired, lazy excuse to come up with something because you couldn't use the Chief any longer. And people in the know don't ever seem to like our uniforms anymore.
Finally, you've already done the stadium upgrades. Let's just get this party started. New uniforms mean new revenue sources, and if they're just a hint of nostalgia and nicely mixed with something hip, who knows, a whole new generation might just start showing up at the ballpark.
So, what do you think? What would you do to update or change the uniforms?
Next: Indians Prospect Profile: Tony Wolters