Joe Maddon clearly wanted to say even more about the Players’ Weekend uniforms being worn around baseball. But even though he somewhat restrained himself, he made his opinions of the all-white or all-black duds pretty obvious.
“I get in so many tough spots when I demonstrate my feelings on certain things,” Maddon said Saturday. “I just don’t know. I’d just like to know who said this was a good idea. That’s the best way I can describe that.”
Maddon said the uniforms are “really awkward, very awkward” and didn’t want to pile onto the online vitriol the uniforms are getting, which is almost universal. He also liked what the Cubs wore last Sunday in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, against the Pirates.
As for how to make the uniforms better next year, Maddon suggested that team leaders should design the sets. For the Cubs, that would put the onus on Jon Lester, Jason Heyward and Anthony Rizzo to come up with something.
“You style the Cubs’ uniforms, then it truly is Players’ Weekend,” Maddon said. “I think you’d get a lot more interesting and better (uniforms) if you went that route.”
So they could stay uniform on Friday, the Cubs paired their all-white uniforms with their traditional blue cap, instead of position-players wearing white and pitchers wearing black. MLB put a stop to that, and all Cubs in the field were wearing white hats with pitchers donning black.
Another complication with the special uniforms are the umpires, whose black and gray outfits easily blend in with teams wearing all black. As Maddon also pointed out, the darkness of the ivy means it can look like players are “disappearing” into the vines.
“It was not good form,” Maddon said. “There’s way I could advocate that. That was not good form. And that’s not even being a traditionalist. That’s just, honestly, it’s another version of the dress code. The worst dressers create dress codes.”
