Every baseball fan has been aware of the floundering situation in south Florida, involving the MLB's Marlins franchise. For a decade, minus a very short stint with apparent pitching phenom Dontrelle Willis, the Florida Marlins were known for nothing more than the cascading blanket of empty seats in Pro Player Stadium (or Dolphin Stadium, or Land Shark Stadium, or Sun Life Stadium, or whatever the heck it's named for this month).
A rebrand of the entire franchise began months ago though, and the opening of a brand new Marlins Ballpark, closer to downtown, and a renaming to the "Miami Marlins" has created a new platform for one of sports' most miserable franchises.
News of a rebrand sounded great at first. The former uniforms and logos were definitely not bad by any means, but the colors just didn't seem right for a team located in Miami. Teal works fine for the city, but black seemed rather bland.
The Marlins never looked bad. They just simply were boring and didn't fit the city's culture, which has had a very progressive theme adopted by a majority of the other sports teams, such as the Miami Heat, Miami Dolphins, and Miami Hurricanes football team.
The general consensus, following the announcement that the team would rebrand, was that the Marlins would need to simply add orange (or choral, as the 'Fins call it) and drop black. Seemed like a logical and vibrant way to update an identity, right?
Too bad that's not what happened. Instead, the Marlins found a way to make what is now being considered one of the ugliest sports uniform designs to ever grace green grass.
I give you the 2012 Miami Marlins' getup. Instead of dropping black and letting the vibrant colors, well, vibe, the franchise unveiled a fishy color scheme that invited black and orange to the fore front, leaving teal to slither its way into the crevices of the shirt-scripts.
Oh, but there's more. Yellow is somehow an addition, but only in the "M" logo. The new script is insanely generic, lending itself to the talents of a starter project in a freshman graphic design course--in a high school.
The new abstraction of the Marlin is cool, but it doesn't speak to superior graphical representation of the past with much leverage.
But, the most puzzling decision of all was to slap a white script on a grey jersey. That's a no-no in the design world. Only the Buckeyes at Ohio State try so hard to get away with it.
The new uniforms are simply the most unfathomable combination of bland and busy that has ever existed. It's as if the design was seemingly put together in ten minutes.
The Marlins went in the opposite direction with their rebrand, which is especially intruiging because so much has been riding on their concept of creating a new team that the city can be proud of.
Jose Reyes may not be able to make these uniforms look good if he stole five bases a game in 2012. It's just hard to imagine how a professional sports franchise could have enough people on a panel look at these designs and throw thumbs upward.
What's even more hysterical is the fact that the team's division rival, the New York Mets, did exactly what the Marlins should have done--Dropped black, added more orange, kept script designs. And man, do they look sharp. Poor Jose Reyes just can't get out of a bad uniform.
But, if you think this is all bad. Stay and have a look at the new center-field collage in the Marlins' new ballpark.
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