We want our uniform drawings in Dressed To The Nines baseball uniform database! If you don’t know what Dressed to the Nines is, it is a digital exhibit in the form of an online database hosted by the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, I highly recommend browsing through it, it has tons of informative information, and is a great resource. Here is the link: http://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/dressed_to_the_nines/database.htm
The majority of drawings shown, the ones that look like paper/cardboard cutouts, are done by Marc Okkonen, who authored the book Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century. Seriously, this is the book that started it all. Okkonen documented uniforms of every major league baseball team of the 20th century, drew them, brought in lots of photography and source material, and compiled it into a beautiful book. This book is essential reading, I strongly recommend buying it, don’t use amazon.
Okkonen is definitely the godfather of the uniform research. Back in ~2012, we based much of our preliminary uniform catalog on his research. But the more we researched and dug in, the more flaws we found from Okkonen’s book and the DttN Database, which lead us to write our own book and create our website. But we aren’t trying to bash him at all. We 100% wholeheartedly praise what Okkonen did. We’ve made countless mistakes in our own research, so we know mistakes are a natural part of doing research. Plus, Okkonen did so much more than we’ve done. He did it for all major league teams in the 20th century. Imagine creating a catalog like our website for all 30 teams, it would take a lifetime to get it this detailed and meticulous.
But now we’ve created a serious project, and there isn’t any other Cardinals uniform database that rivals ours. And on this website, we’re all about being authentic and historically accurate. And that is why we want our drawings to be represented on the BBHoF’s Dressed To The Nines archive.
Take a look below at what some of the Cardinals uniforms look like.
You’ll notice in the second image that Dressed To The Nines started using the official MLB Style Guide batter for their database. After his book was published, as far as we know, Okkonen stopped creating his drawings, and his research became static.
Let’s dig in a bit and do a couple comparison images from their database alongside our own catalog.
You can see in the 1928 comparison above, Okkonen has nice representations of what the uniforms looked like, but it lacks lots of details. We know there is a single bird on the home uniform, but we don’t have the detailed image of what that bird looks like. And take a look below at a modern example when we compare the 2023 uniforms.
Shown above is a comparison of 2023. Dressed To The Nines accurately shows the Cardinals Home and Road uniforms. But that isn’t completely representative of what the 2023 Cardinals wore. When you include all of the alternate caps and uniforms, the Cardinals wore 6 different uniform combinations, not just the home and road.
We’ve done tons of research for our own website, we’re very proud of the catalog we’ve created, and we think our site is the most historically accurate and authentic collection of Cardinals uniform research on earth. Our models have an incredible amount of detail, they’re easy to look at, and what we’ve done really gives the viewer an idea of what the uniforms looked like. We aren’t trying to tell the BBHoF to fix their models and do a whole bunch of extra research and work to get their information up to date, we’ve already done that for them. We want to give our own models and all of our research to them to upload to their site. We want to see our models displayed on the Hall of Fame’s site.
Cardinals Uniforms & Logos 