The Dodgers Came Close to Ditching Dodger Blue For Purple in the '90s
The Los Angeles Dodgers and their iconic uniforms with the blue lettering, red numbers and the white interlocking "LA" logo on the blue cap are inseparable. It's one of the most iconic looks in professional sports, let alone just baseball. But apparently, Dodger Blue was close to being scrapped for purple in the 1990s.
SportsLogos.net — During an appearance on the most recent episode of Unified with Paul Lukas and Chris Creamer, LA Dodgers Senior Design Director Ross Yoshida dropped that previously unheard story on both Paul and myself when prompted to share “something we’ve never heard of before”.
“I was told this by several people because I wasn’t there at the time, not in my role as I am now”, Yoshida warned before continuing, “but apparently when Fox bought the team in 1997, they were interested in changing the Dodgers colour to purple.”
“Purple was a very hot colour back then and I’ve heard from several sources it went pretty far up the chain”.
I know everybody was getting crazy with uniforms in the '90s and there was all sorts of wacky stuff going on, but this would have been sacrilegious. There are some teams in sports who can change colors and uniforms willy nilly and nobody will give a shit. The Atlanta Hawks have gone from red and yellow to red and blue to red and lime green back to red and yellow just in my lifetime and nobody bats an eye. But you can't fuck with the look of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Taking a uniform that was worn by Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax and just deciding to make it purple should be punishable with jail time. Thankfully, somebody with some common sense spoke up and didn't allow this to happen. I hate the Dodgers and can't even imagine being diabolical enough to devise such a ludicrous plan.
And I guess the thinking might have been that the Lakers and Kings were both purple, so this would have created some sort of Pittsburgh-like color familiarity across sports, but you just can't do it. Leave the purple uniforms and dinosaur mascots to another team in the NL West.