2010: A Uniform Odyssey

» 30 June 2010 » In npb »

Update, July 2: Completely forgot about this year’s SoftBank Hawks alternates.

It’s time again for my annual alternative uniforms roundup (last year’s is here). Here’s what we have this year:

  • Yomiuri will sport these cartoonish threads July 19-21 against Yakult. The uniforms were designed by middle school student Hikaru Nomoto, who’s design was selected from out of more than 13,000 entries.
  • This season Seibu is wearing 70’s era throwback uniforms, from when the team was known as the Taiheiyo-Club Lions, prior to Seibu ownership.
  • Nippon Ham chose a garish gold color for this season’s We Love Hokkaido uniforms.
  • The differences between Yokohama’s normal uniforms and this season’s summer alternates are subtle, but pitcher Shun Yamaguchi still called them “unusually stylish”. I wouldn’t mind seeing them keep it simple and re-use these from a couple years ago.
  • Orix’s summer uniforms are red this year, which elicits memories the old red Kintetsu uniforms. Orix also recalled the old Blue Wave team by wearing 1995 throwback uniforms in a game at Skymark Stadium last month. 1995, of course, was the year that Orix lifted the city of Kobe by reaching the Japan Series after the horrific Hanshin Earthquake.

Today’s Japanese vocabulary is 復刻版ユニホーム, (fukkokuban uniform), meaning “re-issue uniform”, though in English we would translate that to “throwback uniform” or “retro uniform”.

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  1. Patrick
    passerby
    30/06/2010 at 10:09 am Permalink

    For Google hits sake, its official English name seemed to be Taiheiyo-Club Lions.

  2. Patrick
    Patrick
    30/06/2010 at 12:39 pm Permalink

    I doubt that term gets much search volume in English, but I’ve edited the post nonetheless.

  3. Patrick
    Deanna
    30/06/2010 at 10:37 pm Permalink

    We had those entry forms for the Giants uniform design thing at my junior high school! A bunch of girls took the papers because it had a picture of Hayato Sakamoto on it, but I am fairly sure absolutely nobody actually bothered to design a uniform.

    The Fighters shoulda quit while they were ahead with the We Love Hokkaido uniforms. The first year’s blue ones were AWESOME and I stll wish I had one, and the second year’s black ones are nice (I have one, I wear it fairly often), but last year’s purple was pretty ugly and this year’s gold is just out garish, yeah. There are some cool alternative shirts and stuff from their FWITH line, but as for the WLH jerseys… ugh.

  4. Patrick
    Patrick
    30/06/2010 at 11:26 pm Permalink

    Yeah, I really liked the blue ones too: http://www.npb.or.jp/teamnews_images/1834_F_02.jpg They should have stuck with that.

  5. Patrick
    John Brooks
    02/07/2010 at 4:15 am Permalink

    Yeah, I second the blue ones. They be a nice jersey to sport around to wear with the good color scheme. As long as no NPB team ends up like the 70s Cleveland Indians or early 80’s White Sox we should be good, those I swear were the worst uniforms ever designed.

  6. Patrick
    npbcardguy
    06/07/2010 at 6:40 pm Permalink

    The Taiheiyo-Club Lions uniforms that they’re using for the fukkokuban uniforms are from 1973-74. The ones they used in 1976 were truly hideous – along the lines of those 70’s Indians uniforms.

    What I’d love to see the Fighters do is dust off the 1973 uniforms of their previous incarnation the Nikkatu Home Flyers. They decided to have each player wear a different uniform based on what position he was playing.- so there were seven different uniforms on the field at any time (the outfielders wore the same design) And all seven design were incredibly ugly.