Reviewing the San Francisco Giants' 2025 City Connect uniforms

New York Times

08-04-2025

The Giants and Nike have announced the new City Connect uniforms for 2025, and, boy, do you have opinions on them. That's just an educated guess. Our simian brains don't like change, so when a baseball team changes anything about their uniform, that means your brain has to process something new for several hours every week. You're still adjusting to Bobby Bonds' kid making the majors, and now you're hit with this? The world needs to slow down.
A new look for a city that never stays still pic.twitter.com/s8sfLtoR3e
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) April 8, 2025
You have opinions on them. I have opinions on them. Let us share these opinions in an online forum.
The only thing you need to remember. For the first, oh, two months the Giants wore their orange creamsicle City Connect jerseys, it was an affront to everything we held dear. Oh, how far we had strayed from the baseball gods' light. Then, after a while, you'd turn on your TV and think, 'Ah. It's one of those games today. Whatever.' Maybe you'd roll your eyes. Maybe you stopped even having a reaction, and it became one of the hundred baseball-related things you didn't think about during a baseball game, akin to a ceremonial first pitch or a scoreboard message promoting the 50/50 raffle. It was a part of the ambient hum in the background.
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You'll get used to it. Doesn't mean you'll buy the gear. Doesn't mean you'll ever love it. But you'll tolerate it. One of my favorite things I've written for The Athletic was a historical deep-dive on proposed baseball team names that didn't make the cut. Here's the link in case you want to be the ninth person to read it, but the condensed version is that you almost never think about how stupid the Phillies' team name is.
It's like having a buddy named James and calling him James Jimmy. Maybe that works for both of you! But that doesn't mean it's anything other than silly.
City Connect jerseys are different from team names because the visual will always exist in contrast to long-established uniforms, and you won't get used them nearly as fast. You'll also have to process them every couple of weeks instead of every day, which means it will take longer for a callous to build.
You'll still get used to them.
The least forgivable sin of the first City Connects was that they used a different orange than the standard Giants orange. You can't establish a team color and then mess with it slightly. You either have to mess with it majorly or leave it alone. Make the uniforms French vanilla and black. Add a splash of silver and lavender in there, whatever. But don't change the orange to slightly different orange. It makes it look like a bootlegged uniform, like the change was made because someone lacked the resources or attention to detail.
While I can't tell you with any palette-determined certainty, it looks like the orange of the 2025 City Connects is closer to the orange that Willie McCovey made pop in the late-'70s. That kind of Halloween orange was dated at one point, and the Giants took it off the bills of their cap, but that just made it cooler. The Padres embraced their diaper-gravy retro color scheme because time made it cooler. Astros fans love wearing the ugliest retro jerseys in baseball history, but that's because they're also the coolest retro jerseys in baseball history. I'm not sure how both things can be true at the same time, but it reminds me of something Noah Cross says in 'Chinatown.'
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Of course I'm respectable. I'm old! Politicians, ugly buildings and retro baseball uniforms all get respectable if they last long enough.
Cross had a different third example than 'retro baseball uniforms,' so I'm paraphrasing, but that's a movie line I think about often. Maybe the creamsicle jerseys could have gotten there, but it took decades for the Halloween orange to become as cool as it eventually became. It was going to take longer, much longer, for the creamsicle orange, specifically because the variation on the regular orange was so slight.
The color scheme for the new City Connects? I can get used to it. The hat bills are different, and not in a bad way. The press release is proud to announce that the violet on the jerseys is a nod to the 1913-17 Giants, who included it as a tribute to New York University for … some reason. The actual reason is probably that manager John McGraw liked tinkering with uniforms before every season. The most famous baseball player to come out of NYU was Ralph Branca, though, so there's at least a little Giants history baked into it.
There are explanations for each variant at the official store website, and here's what they about the font:
A new Giants script, flowing like a psychedelic music poster.
If Moby Grape or Quicksilver Messenger Service released an album titled 'Giants' in 1968, this would not be the font they'd use. This would not be a font used on a Fillmore poster. It is aggressively un-psychedelic. You can tell because there's an actual psychedelic font on the sleeve of this same jersey. But we'll get to that part. This was written by someone whose idea of psychedelic music is a Beastie Boys instrumental.
No, the Giants' City Connect 2025 font is something a video game would use in 1989 through 1999, somewhere between the NES and Sega Saturn, used for a game that's trying to be fun and gritty at the same time. You can 100 percent see Elmer Fudd wearing the Giants' new City Connect jersey in 'Looney Tunes B-Ball.'
That was a '90s approximation of streetball, at least in the minds of game designers who thought 'White Men Can't Jump' was a gritty documentary. Maybe the font is futuristic enough to be used in a Sega Dreamcast game, but that's as far as I'll go. It's a video game font. Unless it's a font that would be on a spray painted shirt you'd buy at Great America in 1998. Unless it's a font that would be on a Rugrats backpack from the same era.
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You get the idea. It's a cutesy font from the '90s with kids being the target demographic. That's not inherently offensive, and I can see growing to tolerate it over time, if not appreciate it. It's not psychedelic, though, and there's nothing inherently San Francisco about it.
You'll still get used to them.
If the fonts are from a '90s video game, the hats are from a '90s video game that couldn't afford the official Major League Baseball license. Here's the team-select screen from 'Super Bases Loaded II' with the hat added in:
You can't even tell that I doctored that image. I know that ugly baseball caps are somehow a robust part of the team-gear industrial complex, but you don't have to watch teams actually wearing most of those hats. These new hats exist to sell people even more hats than usual. They had to come up with something, but it wasn't the something anyone was looking for. The colorful bills almost redeem them, but the font is 'Super Bases Loaded II' all the way, and the letters on the front are the primary focus of the hat.
The new City Connects have a patch that marries the color gradients with a bubbly font that's actually psychedelic, and it's in the shape of a mitt. It's so close to getting it.
I love the idea and the execution … of most of it. The inclusion of the year 1958 — the first year the Giants played in San Francisco — is way too distracting. The '50s and '60s mean very, very, very different things when they're used as shorthand descriptions of an American era. Including a reference to the '50s in a nod to psychedelia is befuddling, at best.
See if there's anything that bothers you about this image:
That's the same thing as this City Connect patch, and I'm going to need to speak to the manager of the person who designed it.
This is for the baseball fan who likes new gear, who spends money on anything new, who is less concerned with nostalgia and more concerned with the present. This is for the fan who color-coordinates their hats with the rest of their outfit, and they're serious enough about this that they own dozens of hats. That's fine. Do you, and don't worry about what weenies like me think.
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It just stinks that every so often, the people who don't like them will have to process them for a couple hours, only to have to do it again on the next homestand and every homestand after that for the next three or four years.
Whatever. They're fine. Willy Adames already has a purple glove, so you know he's ready, and once the players are modeling them, they're on their way to general acceptance.
You don't have to like them, but you'll get used to them.