Categories: Phillies Nuggets with Tim Kelly

Nike’s new jersey rule will almost certainly affect the Phillies

Rhys Hoskins models the red alternate tops that the Phillies wear. (Randy Litzinger/Icon Sportswire)

A new uniform rule — or at least, strong suggestion — from Nike is likely going to directly affect the Philadelphia Phillies in the coming seasons.

St. Louis Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III acknowledged a rumored idea that Nike, who became the official uniform provider of Major League Baseball in 2020, would like to limit the amount of uniforms each team will have to five, including each team’s “City Connect” look.

“Nike is now doing all the jerseys — and one thing I’ll point out about Nike is that they have come to all the clubs and said, ‘We really want to sort of streamline uniforms.’ So there’s a model out there that they want to stick to called ‘four plus one.'” DeWitt II said, according to The St. Louis Post Dispatch. “You have four jerseys that you can wear — home, road and two alternates — plus your City Connect when you unveil that.”

The Phillies currently have five uniforms in their rotation. They wear red pinstripes as their primary home look; gray as their primary road look; cream for day games played at Citizens Bank Park that don’t fall on a Thursday; powder blue throwbacks for home games played on Thursdays and solid red tops with gray pants as their “getaway” uniforms in the final game of a road series.

Under this new rule, the Phillies will seemingly have to pick one of those five to eliminate. The Phillies are one of 16 MLB teams that don’t yet have a “City Connect” uniform. While there has been speculation on what a potential theme could be for the Phillies, mum has been the word from the team on what they will look like and when they will be revealed. But whether it’s in 2023 or 2024, the Phillies, like all teams, will have a “City Connect” uniform.

If the Phillies “City Connect” uniforms aren’t going to debut this upcoming season, perhaps they’ll continue to use the red tops during the final game of roadtrips. Love them or hate them, they certainly stand out. And there’s something to be said for having an alternate jersey for road games, as opposed to wearing the grays 81 times a year.

But while the red alternate tops were worn in San Diego for Game 2 of the NLCS, the Phillies did not wear them on seeming getaway days in Game 2 of the NLWCS or World Series. And remember, the tops have been shelved before.

The Phillies initially introduced the red alternates in 2016, wearing them for weekday day games at Citizens Bank Park. Those lasted just two seasons before the Phillies stopped wearing them at home, instead bringing back the powder blues to wear Thursdays and electing to revert to wearing the cream alternates for any other day games at Citizens Bank Park. The red tops returned in June of 2021, but as mentioned above, this time they were used as a road alternate.

Were you to do a poll of fans on which of the five current jerseys is their least favorite, the red tops would likely edge out the gray road uniforms. Additionally, gray is a traditional road color, and the Phillies have worn this specific version of the color for games away from home since the 1992 season

. For the average fan, it would probably take them quite a while to even notice that the red tops had been phased out, or just limited to being the team’s Spring Training look.

It’s unclear how the Phillies would reshuffle their schedule under these circumstances, because we don’t yet know when their “City Connect” will debut, nor do we know what they will look like. One interesting possibility could be that the always-popular powder blue uniforms are used on the road again, either exclusively or in addition to being mixed in with three other looks – pinstripes, cream and CC – at home. After all, the powder blues were the primary road jerseys from 1972-1988. It wasn’t until 2018 that the Phillies started wearing them at home.

As is, the Phillies have one of the more highly-regarded uniforms sets in the league, even if there are plenty detractors of the red tops. Perhaps in a perfect world, they would just stick with the current rotation. But like it or not, a “City Connect” uniform is coming, and it may be at the expense of a current look.