Love it or hate it, you’re not going to forget it.
The Padres are going to go back full-time to their brown uniforms starting with the 2020 season.
“We’ve officially notified Major League Baseball that we intend to change our uniforms in 2020. We’ve decided the color scheme will be brown and gold in 2020 and beyond,” said a Padres spokesperson to NBC 7.
The franchise is still finalizing the exact looks and styles but the team is adopting a color scheme that focuses on brown with gold, white, and tan accents. They have until May to submit their final designs to MLB and will not be able to officially unveil the new look until the conclusion of the 2019 season.
They wore several variations of brown and mustard with some orange thrown in from their inception in 1969 through their first World Series appearance in 1984, then started working out the mustard before swapping out the brown for blue.
Since the early 2000’s they’ve worn predominantly blue and white uniforms (with the occasional sand and gold thrown in) but over the last couple of years they started to “bring back the brown” during Friday night home games and the occasional throwback game on the road.
The old school Friars unis are some of the most polarizing in professional sports. They’ve showed up on lists of the 10 greatest uniforms of all time and the 10 worst uniforms of all time. Complex Magazine named the early 1980’s version one of the 25 most influential uniforms in sports while acknowledging many people detest it.
The Padres fan base is likely going to feel that kind of split. Even many of the vocal proponents of the brown realize there are folks who won’t like it. Their contention is the team should do something different.
The only other franchise in major professional sports that wears a predominantly brown jersey is the aptly named Cleveland Browns while 17 of the 30 MLB franchises build their color scheme around some shade of blue.
This decision has been a long time coming. In 2016 there was a shift that may have made the current ownership group truly start to seriously consider the brown. The All-Star Game was held at Petco Park and the practice/Home Run Derby jerseys were based on the old brown and mustard.
They flew out of the Team Store like hotcakes.
Since then the Padres have seriously looked into the possibility of going back to its roots (huh, tree roots are kind of the same color now that I think about it) by holding focus groups to see what Padres fans truly wanted to see on the field.
Also, 2020 is the year the Padres are expected to start being seriously in post-season contention. So now they’ll be able to stand out on the field for both the look of the gear and the quality of their play.
