On Monday morning, Nike and Major League Baseball released an awful new Giants jersey that will be worn this weekend and on Tuesdays at home for the rest of the season. On Monday afternoon, Giants fans did the wave. Also on Monday afternoon, the Giants lost a dull, sparkless game.
If you graph these developments and (correctly) assume that the City Connect jerseys were the contagion that infected the team and everyone associated with it, the Giants will cease to exist by Friday. Probably.
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Look at these danged jerseys.
In this city, you're in the presence of Giants. #SFGiants | @nikediamond pic.twitter.com/eXPrO0UJj2
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) July 5, 2021
Beneath the Fog, We’re Golden.
There’s more to San Francisco than meets the eye. The collection’s vibrant colors echo the city’s drive to work hard & stand out. Detailed with the iconic bridge & floating clouds, this collection embodies the hidden treasure that is San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/jM9xAZGqsC
— Nike Diamond (@nikediamond) July 5, 2021
The familiarity heuristic reminds us that we like the stuff we know, and we distrust the things we don’t know. You can understand why evolution might have favored brains wired like this. The familiar berries that are definitely not poison: good, nourishing. The berries that you haven’t tried yet: possibly poison, deadly. This explains why some of us order the same thing at restaurants, and it explains why I keep wearing the hoodie with a hole in the elbow. The other hoodies might be poisonous, and you can’t prove otherwise.
And if you consciously acknowledge these biases, it’s a bit easier to approach something different and new with an open mind. Maybe these uniforms are fine. The orange is perhaps a little too close to “safety orange,” but it’s a direct nod to the color of the Golden Gate Bridge. The “floating clouds” that Nike references in the above tweet — not to be confused with ground-based clouds or sewer gas — evoke the fog that San Francisco is known for. And the script of the “G” was found in a clip art depository from 2002 after the designer googled “What if Scott Spiezio’s goatee were a font?”
Sorry, sorry. Again, we’re trying to avoid the familiarity heuristic and evaluate these jerseys on their merits.
Other than being different, the first problem with these jersey/cap combinations is that they’re claiming to represent the spirit of San Francisco, while asking someone from Portland or New York to figure out what the spirit of San Francisco is at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. “FOG AND THE BRIDGE” allowed them to go home and drink beer, and I can respect that. While it’s possible to get a poster of the top of the Golden Gate Bridge peeking out from the top of a fogbank from Pier 1 Imports, that’s not usually what fog is like¹.
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¹ Source: Me, looking at fog right now. It’s just sorta … up there.
To be fair, however, I’m not sure what would have summarized the city or region without annoying everyone. San Francisco is having something of an identity crisis right now, caught between decades-old memories of what the city was and a modern prosperity that’s muddled it all. It’s still a beautiful, unique city that might be worthy of your pride, but it means a half-million different things to a half-million different people, and it’s a little hard to fit everything/anything on a jersey.
The second problem is that they messed with the orange. Don’t mess with the orange. Not even when referencing a bridge that connects to Marin. Los Angeles is also known for something blue (water theft) that’s a different shade than Dodger blue, but you probably won’t see a different blue on their City Connect jerseys. Giants orange is Giants orange is Giants orange. The bridge has its own orange. Keep it that way.
Those are minor problems, though, in comparison with the biggest problem of all: why the jerseys and caps exist in the first place. It’s not like Nike looked at a bunch of baseball uniforms, thought they were gross, and got in touch with Major League Baseball to help them out. It’s not like fans were clamoring for the team to wear something different for Tuesday home games. And it’s not like Nike isn’t aware of the familiarity heuristic and was caught off guard by negative feedback. They were expecting annoyed comments on social media. They counted on articles like this one. They knew there was almost no chance of universal praise. It’s just too much of a change (although the Marlins’ combination is kinda badass, somehow).
The jerseys and caps exist, though, because they’ll sell a few. Enough to make it worthwhile, at least. The demand was manufactured in a laboratory because the supply needed to exist, which isn’t how Adam Smith said it would work. Baseball fans are something of a captive audience, though, and eventually, the uniforms will stick in enough brains to sneak into carts and closets.
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That messes with one of the reasons baseball is appealing in the first place. It’s supposed to be an escape, a moment in time that’s separate from whatever is going on out there. It’s the local baseball lads in their finery, which reminds you of last year, the year before that and 10 years before that. Jerry Seinfeld had a bit about “cheering for clothes,” but there’s truth behind the comedy. It’s cheering for clothes, yes, but it’s also cheering for familiarity and tradition and constancy. It’s cheering for that thing you’ve reliably cheered for, the experience you’ve had before and will have again.
When you stare out at players in International Orange and a spiky “G,” it will break the illusion. Once it’s shattered, you remember why you’re actually watching baseball: It makes people money. It’s not the organic, shared love of a national pastime that gets the players out there. It’s nothing that you’ll hear whispered over a Ken Burns montage. It’s because people pay money to sit, eat, park, watch … all of it. You can forget this most of the time. Until the Giants wear something that reminds you of it with every pitch.
Nobody asked for these uniforms. Everyone involved knew that more fans would complain than applaud. But they exist anyway because they’ll increase short-term revenue for two corporations. Your feedback has been recorded, but those troughs aren’t going to fill themselves. At the end of the day, you’re a consumer — no more and no less.
The uniforms won’t make you grumble less when the Giants make an error, just as they won’t prevent you from cheering when they hit a home run. You’re not Captain Renault and shocked — shocked! — to find that capitalism is going on here. Unless you want to draw big-picture conclusions about the nature of consumerism and manufactured demand, this isn’t a big deal. You cheer for clothes, and now the clothes are different. You’ll continue to cheer for them, no big deal.
But breaking the illusion of the fan experience, even just a little bit, comes with a small cost. It’s not worth it for you. It’s not worth it for me. It’s probably worth it to the people making money from it. So it goes.
And when you get down to it, it wouldn’t be so bad if the jerseys and caps sucked just a little less. I got used to the Giants having a different spring training hat, in large part because of Willie Mays. But that’s also because those hats don’t suck. Unless they do, and the familiarity bias is now working in their favor.
Either way, get used to the “G” that looks like something worn by fan-favorites Gibco and Catlow in “Bases Loaded 3.” Get used to the floating clouds, and the jersey numbers that remind you less of San Francisco and more of sitting on a cold toilet seat. They’re not going anywhere, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You are a lifelong fan of San Francisco Baseball Associates LLC, after all. Don’t you forget it.
(Photo courtesy of San Francisco Giants)
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