Great article (via Hardball Times) on the rarity of the color brown in baseball.
 |
| 1934 home and away uniforms, the first with orange |
"But the team on the extreme southern tip of California wasn’t always just another navy blue team in a sea of navy blue. There was a time when the Padres had the extremely unusual color scheme of brown-and-gold.
When San Diego entered the National League with this color scheme in time for the 1969 season, it marked the return of brown to the baseball world for the first time in 15 years.
"The aptly named St. Louis Browns were in the American League from the early 1900s until 1953. The Browns started out as a strictly brown-and-white team in 1902 and stayed that way for 32 years. By the 1934 season, the Browns had infused orange into their color scheme and orange would remain a major part of their identify until the team’s final two seasons of existence.
"Then, orange was pushed to the wayside as a tertiary color in favor of white becoming the secondary color once again. This became a fact of life for the Browns for the 1952 and 1953 seasons. In 1954, orange returned to the franchise’s color scheme, but this time it was the primary color along with black — but this is because the St. Louis Browns were now in a new city with a new nickname. You know them now as the Baltimore Orioles."
Read the entire great article here
