Last night the Cardinals officially wore a red jersey in a regular season game for the 2nd time in their 143 year history, as they debuted the City Connects on field for the first time. Scroll down for some pictures I snagged from the Cardinals instagram page. A couple notes too…
Similar to other teams’ City Connect, and similar to the trend of custom helmets to match every hat, the Cardinals did have matching City Connect helmets identical to the caps. They used that raised puffy silicone looking material to make that STL logo pop.
The Whitey Herzog patch was able to be placed on the CC’s in time. I had received artwork for the Herzog patch last week from the Cardinals, and when we opened the files we noticed there would be a custom color coding for the City Connects. What we didn’t know last week was where the Herzog patch was going to go on the uniform considering the team already had a patch on both sleeves. Paul Lukas of Uni-Watch reached out to team President Bill DeWitt III and got confirmation that the patch would be worn above the advertising patch, which it was.
I have a few gripes with the patch situation. First, the Herzog patch looks pretty bad. Not because of its design, but because of it’s material and application. The patch is unquestionably noticeably a printed iron on patch, it’s not sewn or embroidered in any way. It looks really cheap, and on the broadcast last night you could really see it bending and waving with the jersey fabric. Second, and this is just a personal issue I have, there are 3-too-many patches on these uniforms. I don’t really like the look of sleeve patches, I think they’re mostly unnecessary, and when you have 2 patches, one on each sleeve, the jersey looks cluttered. 3 patches is out of control.
Overall, the uniforms looked just OK on the broadcast. I enjoyed seeing them a lot earlier in the game, and I thought initially they looked great. But by the end of the game it was getting tiresome staring at the red blot. It’s hard to see the Birds when seeing this uniform on the broadcast, and a lot of the little cool details they incorporated into the uniform are completely lost when viewed from afar. Good not great.
tldr here’s some pictures.
I also wanted to mention Fredbird last night. I got a glimpse in the 8th inning, only got a quick screenshot. See below. The bird has a red cap, red feathers, red jersey. Red on red on red…
Cardinals Uniforms & Logos 