Shea Bridge Sundays: Bring Back the Black
Black isn't a core Mets color. That's okay.
It’s another Shea Bridge Sunday: when we step back from the hubbub of the offseason, and reflect on what makes the Mets…you know.
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The Mets’ colors are orange and blue. You don’t need to tell me. It’s right there in the song: “Oh, the fans are true to the orange and blue…” There’s no need to argue over what the Mets’ colors are. It’s established, and these arguments aren’t getting us anywhere.
What’s less established, however, is the rule that each team may wear its colors, and only its colors. I’d never read this little-known amendment to the constitution, but once the Mets started talking about bringing back the early-2000’s era black jerseys every once in a while, its proponents came out in force.
I’ve never believed in it. For one, white isn’t a Mets color, nor is that off-white shade they wore between their pinstripes for a few years, but those jerseys never caused much of a stink. The Mets had never worn blue as a base color until the 2010s, but those jerseys — home blues with orange script, road blues with gray block lettering — are perfectly lovely. Gray, come to think of it, isn’t a core Mets color either, but for years, they’ve worn road gray jerseys that fans seem to appreciate. I have a particularly beautiful one (to me, anyway), a DAVIS 28 road gray that I bought at Citi Field on June 13th, 2019. After I put on my new jersey for the first time, the Mets played the Cardinals. They led 4-2 going to the ninth, but Edwin Díaz blew it, stayed in in the tenth, and after the game was suspended until the next day, blew it again. But that’s another story.
So, the black jerseys. To revive or not to revive? As much as I hear the complaints, I just can’t get behind them. The black jerseys are different and cool. They uniquely blend Mets history and progress, something old and something new. And, of course, their revival would make a fantastic excuse to buy a new jersey. Hopefully with George Springer’s name on it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Is black a core Mets color? No, but what does that matter? Neither is powder blue, but half the teams in baseball adopted it last year, with beautiful results. I wish the Mets had adopted it…doesn’t that sound beautiful? Neither is Brown, but the Padres donned brown alternates last season, and looked great as they did.
In the spirit of conciliation and compromise, I won’t argue for the Mets to adopt either of these, even though I think Jeff McNeil would look particularly good in powder blue. I also won’t argue that the Mets should phase in the bright orange “Los Mets” jerseys they wore for a day in 2014, even though those are quite possibly my favorite Mets jerseys ever. I’m a progressive when it comes to jerseys. In my ideal world, the Mets would wear about 12 different jerseys a year. No gimmicks or joke jerseys, but a passel of legitimate, well-designed uniforms, a combination of throwbacks and innovations, all paying homage to Mets history while also looking fresh and new.
Traditionalists, I’m sure, objected to the blue jerseys introduced before the 2012 season. The Mets had never worn them before, after all. But now they’re almost a decade old and going strong, and the home blue WRIGHT 5 jersey that I bought about five minutes after the uniforms first came out still fits perfectly, and carries a decade of memories with it.
There’s no better time than right now. At the dawn of the Steve Cohen era, it makes perfect sense to mark a clean break with the previous period of Mets history by introducing a new uniform. The black jerseys are actually throwing a bone to traditionalists: better to re-introduce a well-known jersey, they’d say, than to come up with a whole new one.
Of course, people on both sides of the issue can rationalize until the cows come home. But really, maybe it’s simpler than it seems. The first Mets game I ever went to was April 18th, 2004, the heyday of the black jerseys, the tail end of the Piazza era and just before Wright showed up. Howie Rose is one of the most prominent critics of the black jerseys. The first game he ever saw in-person, according to his memoir, was July 6th, 1962, a win over the Cardinals. It was 36 years or so before the Mets would wear black.
At its best, baseball makes us feel young. When I was seven, the Mets wore black all the time. When Howie Rose was seven, of course, they didn’t. But we’ll be okay. Whether the Mets wear black or not, they’ll still, at their core, be orange and blue, and that’s true for every seven-year-old Mets fan there’s ever been.