The Padres: Back In Brown


The San Diego Padres have brought back the brown! This past Saturday, the Padres unveiled the team's new brown uniforms. It's a major moment for those of us that have tried to make our voices heard to the Padres organization. I have been a supporter of the "bring back the brown" movement since childhood. Let's talk about the new caps...

The Padres new primary cap resembles the original 1969 cap but with an updated version of the logo they've been using for over fifteen years. They've also updated the cap they wear with the camo jerseys and made it the same shade of dark brown.

The cap worn by new Padres manager Jayce Tingler at his introductory press conference. Notice how warped and out of shape the crown and visor are. It is unknown if the cap was 100% made overseas or if it was "assembled" in Miami. New Era's quality is going downhill like a runaway train.

The new darker-brown camo cap.

There appears to be no other caps. The primary cap will be worn with all uniform combinations. That means the death of the bell panel brown cap they debuted in 2016. R.I.P. to the taco bell cap once again, which makes the full-time return of the brown and gold bittersweet for me. However, we have yet to see what the spring training cap will be. Cross your fingers and hope that we'll see a bell panel brown and gold cap with that funky honeycomb-patterned fabric.

One thing that marred the uniform unveiling (for us cap nerds, anyway) was the fact that the new caps featured the trademark "Elmer Fudd" crown (as many cap collectors call it), a trademark of New Era's caps made overseas. I personally call them "onion domes" because they look more like the piece of Russian architecture in my opinion. Unfortunately, this is the new normal. From what we saw with the Player's Weekend caps, the onion dome caps will be the new normal as the Miami-made caps are being made this way and not retaining the construction profile of the caps made at the now-closed New Era plant in Derby, NY. I weep for the fact that we'll never get to have one of the new Padres caps made at Derby. The caps that were for sale at the Padres team store during the uniform unveiling were made in Bangladesh. A sad time indeed. Here's to hoping I can clean up at the next Padres fan fest and get as many bell panel caps as I can get, hopefully team issued and USA made.

Comments

  1. StevenHWickerSeptember 23, 2021 at 8:22 AM

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