Astros makeover

This is a couple of weeks old, but I haven’t seen it elsewhere and it’s pretty cool:

As many of you know, I have written about my love of the Houston Astros uniforms from the 1970’s and 1980’s several times. The Astros were by far my favorite team growing up and the whole thing started with the uniforms and the logos. I was a huge fan of the rainbow era uniforms. I was an even bigger fan of the second evolution of the rainbow look with the shoulder stripes. Everything about the Astros logos and uniforms was at the top of my list.

When the team switched to their new look in 1994, I lost my love for the team. The last two logo and uniform evolutions for the team have not lived up to the great looks they had early on. So…what if you could take the team’s current color scheme and styling and add some retro flair back into it? Here’s my shot at bringing back some of that old school magic, paired with their color combination of today.

For those of you who can’t click through to the pics — and if you can you should — the author basically proposed bringing back the star-H hats and something which looks very much like the more subdued, 1980s-era rainbow colored jerseys, font and all, but substituting the current brick red for the orange.

I think the thing with this is that you can’t go too crazy. Sure, everyone — myself included from time to time — talks about how great the old rainbow scheme was, but when I think harder about it, I must admit that the old Astros stuff is probably more fun to look back at now than it was to experience then. Others may disagree, but I remember not liking it all that much when I was a kid, and to the extent I have any admiration for it now it likely stems from some sense of so-bad-its-good irony and a touch of nostalgia. A couple of years ago I did a couple of giant posts about my favorite and least favorite uniforms for each team (AL here) and the rainbows didn’t make the grade. I picked the late 60s-early 70s shooting star getup and gave voice to a return-to-the-Colt .45s pipe dream.

But I did always like the star-H, though, and have to say that the author’s stab at this is a great improvement over the current, fairly wretched ensemble.


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sansho1
14 years ago

The HOF uniform database is a neat site, and it features one of the greatest examples of unintended comedy I’ve ever seen.

Rather than spoil it, I encourage everyone to go to the site and enter their favorite team with the range 1993-2003.  Pay particular attention not to the uniforms, but to the silhouettes….

http://tinyurl.com/cxq4tv

dtro
14 years ago

No black in uniforms! No black in uniforms!

Um, unless you’re the White Sox.

YankeesfanLen
14 years ago

I fool around and buy some old (film) SLR cameras off ebay, mainly to get the lens for my digital stuff.  So sometimes they just send the whole set-up with the case and a couple of months ago I get one with orange-red rainbow stripes on it and I’m trying to figure out why this looks familiar in some way.
Then, thanks to this post and comments, I go through early 80s Astro uniforms, and THERE IT IS!
And, it had come with a Minolta Maxxum 7000, leading me to the very shaky conclusion that they had a camera case bag night at the AstroDome in 1985.
But shaky conclusions are my specialty and many people believe me, because I guess, it COULD have happened/  Does baseball-reference have a list of promotions going back to the Civil War too?

Adam
14 years ago

As an AStros fan, I think the hats would be a huge upgrade over the current design. Not so sure about the logo or going back to the block font design.

RoyceTheBaseballHack
14 years ago

My unofficial polling of the considerable Astros fan base here in North Texas has this suggestion as a runaway hit. Except, we’re in agreement that road uni’s need “Houston” across the front. The swirling baseball logo, in particular, has people in a fevered pitch. Too bad it’s just a dream.

As an FYI – when the first real rainbow uniform came out, it coincided with a remodeling of The Dome that featured the bottom rung of seats done in the same motif.

Vinnie
14 years ago

I think he’s got it backwards. The old font was way too era-specific, but the old color scheme needs to come back.