When San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval cranked three home runs into the stands of AT&T Park during game one of the 2012 World Series, he did so in pretty much the same outfit Willie Mays was sporting when he pulled off “The Catch” in 1954. It’s one of the most traditional uniforms in professional baseball, a cream-coloured set that looks as crisp and smart as the ones the team wore when they entered the National League back in 1883.
Long before they were the San Francisco Giants, they were the New York Giants. And before they were the Giants, they were the New York Gothams, an upstart club of mustachioed ballplayers and the talk of Harlem from the moment they took to the old Polo Grounds.
Legend says the Gothams were rebranded the Giants by their manager, Jim Mutrie, in 1885 after he began referring to his players as “my giants.” The name stuck, and soon the team began experimenting with different uniform designs. It wasn’t long before the Giants’ cream-coloured uniform was replaced by an all-black set with “NY” on the arm. That was followed shortly by a purple-and-white plaid getup that looked ridiculous even in 1916. By the time the Giants arrived in Chicago for the 1917 World Series, they were sporting a tightly checked plaid uniform with purple lettering stitched to their chests. They lost the Series and soon ditched the plaid, opting for blue pinstripes before reverting back to the classic cream we know today.
The most successful NYC-based ball club during the first quarter of the 20th century (pushing the Yankees out of Manhattan but eventually losing fans to the Bronx Bombers and Brooklyn Dodgers), the team added the orange outline to the now-iconic black-lettered “GIANTS” logo on the front of their home jerseys in 1933 (their road jersey had “NEW YORK” on the front). Aside from a brief switch to a more patriotic red, white and blue combination during the Second World War, the team has maintained that exact colour scheme ever since.
When the proud franchise relocated to the Bay Area in 1957, a simple substitution of “SF” for “NY” on the players’ caps completed the move. But the team’s good fashion sense continued to live on in the Big Apple; the Mets resuscitated the Giants’ old stylized “NY”—and stole their orange—when they entered the majors four years later.
