Uni Watch's Flashback: The D-Backs' purple pursuit

When a team unveils a new uniform set, most of us tend to have an instant reaction -- "Love it," "Hate it," or "Meh" -- even though we haven't yet seen the uniforms on the field and are just going by press photos or mock-ups. Often, those initial assessments hold up over time. But sometimes they don't.

Consider, for example, the Arizona Diamondbacks. They've been in existence for only 20 years, but they're already in their third major uniform era. First, they wore their inaugural purple and teal set, then came the Sedona red set, and now they have the snakeskin set with the bizarre dark-gray road uni.

Those first uniforms -- the ones from the Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling era, which were worn from 1998 through 2006 -- have been getting a showcase lately as part of the D-backs' 20th-anniversary program. The team has trotted out a series of purple and teal throwbacks for select games, which has made one thing crystal clear: The D-backs' original uniform set has aged very, very well.

That assessment might come as a surprise to readers who are familiar with your friendly uniform columnist's longstanding antipathy toward purple. But there's no getting around it -- those uniforms looked great, purple and all. They're also one of the more misunderstood uniform sets of the past generation.

Looking back, the D-backs' original uniforms were unusual in several regards, beginning with their unveiling. The full set was revealed at a news conference on Nov. 2, 1995 -- nearly two and a half years before the team's first official game, which might still be the unofficial record for the longest such gap. The team didn't yet have any players under contract, but D-backs owner Jerry Colangelo also owned the NBA's Phoenix Suns at the time, so he had Suns coach Paul Westphal and players Danny Manning, Danny Ainge, Wesley Person and Kevin Johnson serve as uniform models -- presumably the first time NBA personnel had participated in an MLB uni unveiling.

The uniforms seemed as atypical as the unveiling. When the Diamondbacks took the field in 1998, they had two home white uniforms (actually home off-white, as the color was slightly cream-toned), a set of road grays, two solid-colored alternate jerseys that could be worn at home or on the road, and an unprecedented four different caps. That might not seem like a lot of mix-and-match options by contemporary standards, but at the time it made people's heads spin.

At first glance, these uniforms seemed to fit into two 1990s patterns. First, the NBA uni scene had gone a little bonkers in the mid-'90s, and ditto for NHL uniforms, so it was easy to see the Diamondbacks' dizzying array of uni options as the leading edge of a similar MLB trend toward breaking from established norms. In addition, the D-backs' color scheme fit squarely into the larger 1990s bandwagon of teams across the uni-verse adopting purple and teal.

All of that initially led most observers, including this one, to view the D-backs' inaugural uni set as newfangled, anti-traditional, and hopelessly dated. But in hindsight, the uniforms fell more into the classicist camp. Consider:

• The home and road sets both had pinstripes. It doesn't get much more traditional than that.

• The off-white home designs were a nod to the cream-colored uniforms of the flannel era.

• The team's primary logo -- a Southwestern-trimmed "A" with a snake's forked tongue incorporated into the letterform -- was a very strong, durable mark that the team still uses today.

• The jersey that came to symbolize this era for the D-backs was the home vest with nothing but that "A" logo on the chest -- an extremely old-school look once you get past the 1990s color scheme.

• Although most players opted to wear their pants down to their ankles or shoe tops, those who went high-cuffed exposed a bonus "A" logo on their stirrups -- another old-school detail. (There were initial reports that manager Buck Showalter required players to cuff their pants high enough for the logo to show, but this is an urban legend easily refuted by photographic evidence. Showalter himself has said that the rule was only for the team's minor league players, not for big leaguers.)

Despite all of that, the color scheme and the mix-and-match carousel, combined with Arizona's expansion status, led to the team being tagged as some sort of uni-versal disruptor. So when the Diamondbacks faced the Yankees in the 2001 World Series, the party line from many observers (again, including this one) was that it was old-school versus new-school, tradition versus innovation. In reality, both teams had classic looks -- but in the D-backs' case, it just took a little while for everyone to recognize it.

Seventeen years later, the D-backs have gone through two major design overhauls, each one a significant downgrade. Whenever they wear the purple-era throwbacks (the next time they're slated to do so is on June 14 against the Mets), the feedback from fans is loud and clear: "They should go back to wearing these full time!" True enough -- they've never looked better than they did right out of the box, even if many of us mischaracterized those original uniforms at the time. It's a good reminder that first impressions can sometimes be mistaken.

Paul Lukas' initial reaction to the Diamondbacks' current uniform set was mostly negative, and he doesn't expect to be revising that opinion years from now. If you like this column, you'll probably like his Uni Watch Blog, plus you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook and sign up for his mailing list so you'll always know when a new column has been posted. Want to learn about his Uni Watch Membership Program, check out his Uni Watch merchandise, or just ask him a question? Contact him here.