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Times...
]October 8, 2006
Flushing
At Shea, the Name of the Game Is Color War
By JOHN FREEMAN GILL
When the New York Mets took the field at Shea Stadium on Wednesday for Game 1 of the National League Division Series, Paul Lukas, an ardent lifelong fan, was in the loge, wearing a blue Mr. Met cap and cheering the players on.
It was a beautiful afternoon for baseball, with red, white and blue bunting fringing the green grass beneath a deep blue sky. But amid all the color and pageantry, Mr. Lukas could not help feeling rankled by the inclusion of one nontraditional hue in the team’s uniforms: black, the dominant color in the Mets’ caps.
“It’s the home opener, they’ve got the bunting up, and the blue cap is their official home cap as stated in the Major League Baseball Style Guide,” said Mr. Lukas, the editor of Uni Watch blog, a Web log devoted to sports uniforms. “They’ve got all this tradition going on, and they can’t even honor their own tradition.”
When the Mets began play in 1962, the fifth season after the Brooklyn Dodgers’ and New York Giants’ much-lamented departures for California, their uniform incorporated blue and orange as a respectful nod to those two franchises. But in 1998, the Mets began including black in the team’s home and away uniforms, in various combinations.
“The black was added as a style element based on some degree of research of fans in terms of what was popular in the marketplace,” Dave Howard, the Mets’ executive vice president of business operations, said on Thursday. “At the time, our traditional hats and uniforms were selling hardly at all.”
But to Mr. Lukas, the change bordered on sartorial sacrilege. “It would be like if in Washington they decided that the red, white and blue is a little outdated, and maybe we should change the red to a burgundy,” he said. Consequently, as the team charged toward the high-visibility postseason, Mr. Lukas launched a playful but heartfelt campaign calling on the Mets to banish black from their uniforms and “reinstate blue to its place of chromatic supremacy in the team’s color scheme.” So far, more than 800 fans have signed on to his petition, at www.ditchtheblack.com.
Mr. Howard said that the Mets’ uniforms would remain the same through 2007 but that the team might revisit the issue for the opening of the club’s new ballpark in 2009. Still, he said, “if you look around the building, you’re seeing a lot of the black, so it’s clear fans vote most effectively with their pocketbook.”
In Shea’s loge, opinions on the question were mixed.
“They’ve had a lot of losing in the past, so it’s cool they have something newer, to start a new tradition,” said Derik Aasan, a 28-year-old beer sales representative.
Joe Campbell, a 50-year-old database administrator, disagreed. “For a lot of people, blue and orange is what they grew up with, and a change from that is a change from tradition, so it doesn’t appeal,” he said.
Why, then, was Mr. Campbell wearing a predominantly black Mets jersey? “It was the only one I could get,” he said ruefully.
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