The Braves will wear gold-accented uniforms throughout their season-opening homestand, continuing the fashion statement of defending World Series champions over the past decade or so.
All World Series winners since 2010 – and several before that – have gone for the gold in their home uniforms at the start of the following season.
The Braves heartily followed suit.
“I’m a little bit biased, but I tend to think that the gold works really well against the backdrop of our color scheme,” Braves President and CEO Derek Schiller said. “First of all, with the tomahawk (on the jersey), we actually already had some gold in our color palette.”
For the first seven games of the season, the Braves have added celebratory touches of gold to their home white uniforms, accenting the team’s traditional elements of red and navy blue.
On the front of the jerseys, gold trim has been added around the edges of the “Braves” script and around the edges of the tomahawk. On the back, the players’ numbers are outlined in gold, and the MLB logo silhouette is gold instead of the normal white.
Credit: Tim Tucker / AJC
Credit: Tim Tucker / AJC
On the left-arm sleeve of the jerseys, the Roman numeral “IV” is in gold above a star, signifying the franchise’s four World Series championships (1914 as the Boston Braves, 1957 as the Milwaukee Braves and 1995 and 2021 as the Atlanta Braves). On the right sleeve, a World Series patch contains the capitalized word “CHAMPIONS” in gold.
On the cap, gold trim has been added to the white “A” logo, and another World Series Champions patch is accented with gold.
The idea of defending champions returning to the field in gold apparently originated with the Boston Red Sox after they broke an 86-year drought by winning the 2004 World Series. For their ring-presentation ceremony on opening day 2005, the Red Sox wore jerseys that featured the numbers outlined with gold stitching. The Red Sox changed into their regular jerseys for the game that day.
The 2006 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals expanded on the Red Sox precedent, wearing gold-trimmed jerseys for their first three games of the 2007 season. And since the 2010 champion San Francisco Giants, every World Series winner has started its next home season in varying amounts of gold and for varying numbers of games.
The Braves decided to wear gold-accented uniforms for the entire opening homestand: a four-game series against Cincinnati followed by a three-game series against Washington. Later in the season, they plan to wear them again for “two or three” additional games, Schiller said. Maybe a bit more than that, he added, if the players like them so much that they insist.
Of course, defending champions have a financial motive in going for the gold: merchandise sales. Replicas of the Braves’ “Gold Collection” jerseys and on-field caps went on sale in the Braves Clubhouse store at Truist Park on Tuesday.
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