For the first time in more than 25 years, Major League Baseball is using new colors and logos. And the league has quietly been using them for months.
As reported by SportsLogos.net's Chris Creamer on Tuesday, MLB rolled out an updated look in recent months despite making no official announcement regarding the changes. And unlike its one-day Mike Trout logo, a tribute to fans who tried retweeting Trout's figure onto a permanent redo of the famous MLB logo, the league's new graphic isn't so much a makeover as it is a touch-up.
The changes: MLB's primary colors of red and blue have been darkened "to be an exact match with the official colors of the flag of the United States," according to Creamer, and the words "Major League Baseball," previously printed in red beneath the famous batter logo, have been dropped altogether. Before the update, per Creamer, the MLB logo featured arbitrarily assigned shades of red and blue -- shades that were last adjusted, to make the blue darker and the red brighter, in 1992.
Here's what the logo looked like before and after the slight changes.
USATSI
"We think the colors now really stand for how fans embrace everything," Anne Occi, MLB's vice president of design services, told Creamer. "So we took the colors of the American flag and we put those into the batter. We wanted to send a very strong message about the National Pastime."
The removal of the "Major League Baseball" lettering, meanwhile, has been offset with the creation of new alternate MLB logos, some of which feature "MLB" printed next to or beneath the batter logo -- or all by itself, in the dark blue font. And contrary to the temporary Mike Trout tease, the traditional white-colored batter has remained exactly the same.
"Our batter has such strength, we did not alter or change the batter at all," Occi told Creamer. "We found that that was very successful and there was no need to change it. We looked at a variety of things but it really came back to the fact that the batter didn't need to be fixed."
All of these changes have been in effect during the 2019 season, with MLB.com, MLB TV and MLB fields integrating the new color scheme and logo. No formal announcement was made, per Creamer, because the change was "so minor you don't even see it unless you put (the logos) up side-by-side."
