"This is the Uniform They'll Be Wearing"

Once again, the Brewers' World Series run gives everyone an opportunity to comb through through their baseball archives and post the choicest goodies. Not to be outdone, the Wisconsin Historical Society offers us this stunning find: Bud Selig's original concept uniforms for our 1970 Milwaukee Brewers!

We've discussed Bud Selig's intended uniforms before. When he founded the group to bring baseball back to the Cream City, he commissioned a navy blue and red prototype uniform (at least one, but possibly up to three or four) for display. Navy blue and red, of course, were the colors of the Milwaukee Braves, but also of the American Association Brewers that preceded them.

Selig took his prototype to at least one Major League Baseball owners' meeting as "proof of concept", a visual aid while (unsuccessully) pitching Milwaukee as an expansion market, and we have media reports that when at the time he was granted the right to buy the Seattle Pilots out of bankruptcy during Spring Training of 1970(!), a prototype was on public display in downtown Milwaukee, at College Athletic sporting goods store on Plankinton Ave.

The rushed circumstances surrounding the Pilots' move to Milwaukee meant Selig had to adapt the existing uniforms rather than replace them, and our Brewers have been blue and gold ever since. But what would the Brew Crew have looked like had Bud been able to run with his initial idea?

In the past, we have only seen a bad black and white scan of this prototype. Now we have color video footage from WTMJ sports of then-Packers defensive end Lionel Aldridge modeling the uniform!

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Let's take a closer look at this uniform.

When the Milwaukee Brewers take the field on Opening Day, this is the uniform they'll be wearing.

Important to remember the compressed timeline here; the Brewers' move was announced on March 31, 1970, seven days before Opening Day. Reportedly, the club's gear had been loaded on trucks at the Pilots' spring training site in Arizona and driven north to Utah, where they sat waiting to be told whether to drive west or east. There was simply no time to actually order this uniform before the start of the season.

The uniform itself is a standard baseball uniform, navy blue pinstripes over gray.

Gray? That doesn't look like a road uniform. Maybe he meant off-white?

And as you can see, the name "Brewers" is written across the front of it and obviously, someone felt we were going to get a baseball team here because this uniform has been ready for some time.

That "someone" is, of course, Bud Selig, who started pushing for an expansion franchise the minute his attempts to keep the Braves in town failed.

It's strange now, in our 24-hour instant-news world, to imagine a society where Bud's quest could have been going on largely behind the scenes. Right now we have the possibility of future MLB expansion on the table, and ownership groups from all across the country are waging grand political battles to be seen as the best choice. At least one would-be "frontrunner" has a bid which is itself little more than a name and a uniform.

Why personally, I just hope it fits the baseball players a little better than it does me.

Aldridge is correct, the uniform doesn't fit him very well. It was designed to be displayed on a mannequin, not a 6 feet 3 inch tall, 254 pound professional football player.

The cap is also navy blue with a red, Swiss-embroidered block M. Obviously, the M stands for "Milwaukee".

I'm not familiar with what he means by "Swiss embroidery". I understand the term to refer to one of a couple techniques, but I don't think he means intricate lace work or decorative borders. Perhaps it had a different useage at the time, or he just means that the logo is fully embroidered as opposed to a patch sewn on to the cap.

On the left shoulder of the Brewers uniform is the official emblem of the ballclub.

This one reveals how jury-rigged the uniform is. The "emblem" appears glued to the sleeve, clearly pulling away on the left side.

This logo would remain with the American League club (albeit recolored in Seattle's blue and gold) through the 1977 season. It was an adaptation of one of the original American Association mascot logos, taken from a 1947 program cover, with the city and team name added in a circle around it. The logo was proudly displayed on the Chicago White Sox games played in Milwaukee in 1969, as the official logo for Selig's expansion group.

The uniform itself is styled after the New York Yankees, but let's just hope that the Brewers can play a little bit better than the Yankees have of late.

Coach Murphy approves of any opportunity to throw shade at the Yanks.

The t-shirt is navy blue and so are the socks, which of course matches the navy blue pinstriping in the uniform.

So, when your Milwaukee Brewers take to the field on Opening Day, this is how they'll look.

Not quite, as it turns out. But that was very much Bud Selig's plan.

Personally, I don't think this is a great look. I reminds me very much of the Minnesota Twins of the 1960s, which of course were just their predecessor Washington Senators with the name changed, as would eventually happen with the Brewers and the Pilots. Expansion teams in those days were thrifty.

So now we know beyond any doubt that the Brewers were supposed to be blue and red. But once they borrowed the Pilots' color scheme, they've never looked back; the shades of blue and gold have changed—from royal blue to navy and from athletic gold to metallic gold and back again—but the basic scheme has held. The World Champions' contemporary look is very much determined by a last-minute relocation fifty-six years ago.

How different might our True Blue Brew Crew look today had circumstances not intervened?