Brewers fans who stayed up late Tuesday to watch Milwaukee play in San Francisco caught a glimpse of the Giants’ “City Connect” jerseys, one of several radical re-designs for alternate jerseys around Major League Baseball this year.
The Nike threads highlight the city’s most enduring feature, the Golden Gate Bridge. The Giants are one of seven teams to have donned the eye-popping alternates this season, including Boston, both Chicago squads, the Dodgers, Diamondbacks and Marlins.
Will the Brewers get a City Connect jersey of their own? It sounds like the answer is yes, though it might not happen immediately next year.
According to reporting by ESPN’s Joon Lee, league officials expect every MLB team to have a City Connect jersey by 2023. He wrote that the City Connect revolution is an approach to target younger audiences, something with which the NBA has had success.
“City Edition” jerseys have been part of the NBA fabric since 2017-18. The 2021 NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks used a color scheme heavy on the “Great Lakes Blue” as a nod to Lake Michigan this past season. The jerseys appeared once in the postseason.
Previous Bucks city jersey installments have included a design reminiscent of the eye-catching golden floor at the Bucks’ old arena, the MECCA, and “Cream City” jerseys that offered a nod to one of Milwaukee’s nicknames. The idea is to incorporate aspects of the community into the design.
For example, the Red Sox fashioned jerseys intended to evoke the Boston Marathon, and the Cubs’ uniforms read “Wrigleyville” across the front. The White Sox went with black jerseys with white pinstripes and “Southside” scrawled across.
JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.
