Royals: Crown worthy or not? Best and worst KC jerseys

The Kansas City Royals’ uniforms reflect the organization’s conservative character. Changes are rarely bold or garish. What are the best and worst of the club’s jerseys?

This is not a story about baseball players. It’s a story about the uniforms they wear, specifically the jerseys of the Kansas City Royals.

Indulge me, if you will, two things: not writing about players per se,  and writing in the “first-person,” a perspective from which I rarely write about baseball or anything else for that matter. I prefer the distance “third person” purports to keep me from excessive opinion, although opinion is unavoidable when writing about baseball and the men who play it. Appropriate narrative of the game must necessarily blend fact and opinion.

First-person fits here because choosing the best and worst Royals’ jerseys is entirely a subjective task, based exclusively on my opinion of what makes good baseball uniforms good and bad baseball uniforms bad. There are no objective standards by which to measure the aesthetics of such things–one either likes a uniform or doesn’t.

Take, for example, the old uniforms of the San Diego Padres, whose brown and yellow design would have driven me from their telecasts to their radio broadcasts if I’d been a fan of the club; or, most recently, the odd concoctions that made up the garb of the Arizona Diamondbacks, which strike me as the most unsightly unis in the contemporary game. (Fortunately, the D-backs are abandoning them in favor of uniforms more pleasing to the eye).

This story is my assessment of the best and worst Kansas City jerseys. They haven’t really changed all that much through the years and, but for the softball-influenced double-knit, uni era and the advent of the alternate jersey, the subject of Royals jerseys could be quickly exhausted.

You may not agree with my “findings,” but I give to you my thoughts about a highly visible component of the game, one independent from statistics, analytics, or complicated metrics and measures. Have some fun with it.

I begin with a little background of my interest in baseball uniforms…