1918 Black or Blue

For the 1918 and 1919 seasons, we originally believed the team wore the following.

• Blue caps with a Red STL.
• Shirts and pants with blue pinstripes.
• White socks with a thick red stripe near the top.
• Red Belts

We held this estimation for nearly 10 years, until October 2023 we discovered a newspaper article that explains the following.
St. Louis Star and Times: April 8, 1918
The uniform of the Cardinals has been changed. The body is of gray instead of the 1917 drab, with a fine green stripe running through. On the left sleeve is a United States flag, while “Cardinals,” in that color, appears on the breast of the shirts. The caps are black and the upper half of the stocking black with the lower half white.

History Mysteries:
Where the caps black or blue?
Were the sock stripes black or blue?
What is green and what is blue?

This article confuses us for a few reasons. First, we think the writer starts by describing a road uniform, and goes on to say it has green pinstripes. However, the Cardinals museum is in possession of a 1918 Branch Rickey road jersey, in which the pinstripes are very clearly blue, and not green. This isn’t the only instance of the team having two different color pinstripes on home/road uniforms, but it would be the earliest example and would set the precedent for future years, such as 1926 and 1927, and possibly 1928. We are now working under the assumption that maybe the home uniform had greenish pinstripes and the road uniform had blueish pinstripes. The biggest issue with that assumption is the article explicitly explains a gray body with fine green stripes. But again, that is not evident in the physical sample the Cardinals have on display in Ballpark Village.

The next surprising thing is the writer says the team wore black caps. Since the team changed its identity to red in 1899, they had never worn any colors except for Red (excluding white and gray home/road fabrics). Starting in 1922, we begin to see a multitude of colors incorporated into the team’s uniforms and logos, including red, blue, green, yellow, and black. Black and yellow stitching were introduced in 1922 with the addition of the Birds on the Bat sitting on a black bat. Green and blue were introduced in the following years with pinstripe and sock stripe colors. But with 1920 and 1921 acting as a buffer for being a purely red team between 1919 and 1922, the 1918 and 1919 season are an anomaly. We originally thought the caps were blue, or perhaps a dark navy blue, but this was estimated based on much later years like the 1940s. For now, we have changed the blue from PMS 288 to PMS 289, the latter is the current blue the Cardinals use, but appears very dark. We believe the writer may be mistaking a very dark blue for black.

The same might be able to be said about socks. Again, the Cardinals had never worn any other colors except for Red. Typically teams were identified by the colors they wore. The Browns were called that because of their brown socks. The White Stockings, the Red Stockings, the Cincinnati Reds, etc. The team had not been identified as a type of bird yet, that wouldn’t happen until 1922 or the 1921 Church Dinner at the earliest. So their only identifying brand was the color they wore, which was now allegedly black. 

The April 8 article from the Star and Times is the only written account we have regarding the 1918 and 1919 uniforms, and it is the only thing we have to corroborate black and white photography. The models have been updated, but we are still searching for more written accounts to solidify this claim.