D’Backs Throw It Back… To Ten Years Ago

The Diamondbacks will wear these ancient uniforms for three days next season.

Via MLB.com:

The Arizona Diamondbacks will turn back the clock Sept. 9-11 when they officially celebrate the 10th anniversary of the club’s World Series championship with the “2001 World Championship Reunion Weekend.”

The weekend will begin with the D-backs wearing throwback jerseys for the Sept. 9 game against the Padres. The club will wear the traditional home white top with purple pinstripes and the “A” logo. That was one of the uniform tops the club wore from 1998 through 2006, when its color scheme was purple, turquoise, copper and black. In 2007, the team switched to its current color scheme of sedona red, sonoran sand and black.

Seeing this bit of news made me think of two things.

First off, we never really acknowledge just how insane it is that the Diamondbacks won a World Series in their fourth year of existence. My Brewers took 13 seasons just to reach a World Series and haven’t been back since. The Rangers just made their first World Series in their 51st season of existence (including their time as the second Washington Senators). It took the Arizona Diamondbacks all of three seasons from their very first game to bring home the Commissioner’s Trophy, an accomplishment we may never see again in professional sports.

On a second note, how bad were those first Diamondbacks jerseys? Green pinstripes with purple undershirts? The fact that the Diamondbacks have to use throwbacks for those jerseys – jerseys a youngster like myself can actually remember seeing a team play in on TV – really tells us how bad they were. The Diamondbacks only used them for nine seasons before realizing a redesign was completely and totally necessary. Now, I think the Diamondbacks have one of the better color/uniform combinations in the game. Back then? It was an interesting attempt at reproducing the look of the Diamondback, but in the end, these uniforms deserved their early retirement.