See-through baseball pants have fans and brands pointing fingers

Although Nike was responsible for the uniform redesign and the MLB approved it, baseball fans have overwhelmingly blamed the Fanatics. That’s despite the fact that the league’s uniforms have been manufactured in the same factory since the early 2000s, with no problems reported before this year.

“We purely do exactly what we’re told, and we’re told we’re doing everything exactly right,” said Michael Rubin, the founder of Fanatics, said during a sports analytics conference at MIT this month. Despite this, he said the company took the brunt of the criticism. “So that’s not nice,” he added.

Fanatics has become a target for many because it produces and sells the on-field apparel and officially licensed equipment for most major professional sports leagues in the United States. The company is gone indicted multiple time, with many claiming it has a monopoly on sports memorabilia. The MLB gear, which Nike designs and Fanatics produces and sells, isn’t cheap either: a 2024 jersey costs about $175but certain editions cost almost $400. Prices are comparably high for Nike/Fanatics replica jerseys from the NFL and NBA

Matt Powell, a senior consultant at BCE Consulting who has researched the sports retail industry for more than two decades, said the biggest problem with MLB uniforms this season was the way they were marketed. “They sold it poorly,” Mr. Powell said. “When players showed up for spring training, they were suddenly given a different jersey than they were used to, and no one explained the benefits, why the changes were made or the work they did to develop the product. If Nike had communicated the changes better, this would not have become a flashpoint.”

The uniform debacle is also indicative of the way sportswear is changing and becoming increasingly performance-oriented, sometimes at the expense of aesthetics and quality. Nike isn’t even the only athletic apparel company to have a see-through pants scandal. In 2013, investors archived a class action lawsuit against Lululemon, whose stock price plummeted after a recall for its sheer black yoga pants.

“You’ve had this evolution of fabrics,” said Todd Radom, who wrote the book “Winning Ugly: A Visual History of the Most Bizarre Baseball Uniforms Ever Worn” and personally designed the logos and uniforms for multiple MLB teams. “They switched to synthetics in the early 1970s. There has been an arms race to become lighter and cooler.