Baseball 101: Expressing the sport through a wide spectrum of color

Green was the first thing that caught the eye and captured the imagination at Yankee Stadium. For generations, and possibly still today, the bright and pristine yards and yards of green grass created even more of a first impression than the upper deck, the monuments or the art-deco frieze.

“When I first told someone about seeing the expanse of green in the outfield as one walked up the ramps at Yankee Stadium before the whole field was exposed, I thought I was being brilliantly literate. Now, it seems that everyone has that same memory,” said author and historian Marty Appel, a lifelong fan who became the Yankees’ public relations director and executive producer of their telecasts.

The background to that shared experience, he said, was that Baby Boomers grew up watching games on black-and-white television, with only rare glimpses of vividness from baseball cards and magazine photos. So, with the first glimpse in person, the color stood out.

It still does, in many ways. Baseball expresses itself — for better or worse — in colors as much as numbers, words and emotions. Sometimes they all come together.

Jay Goldberg’s multimedia project, “The Memory of America: Remember Your First Baseball Game” is bursting with hues. For instance, here is how Robert Pinsky recalled his first visit to Ebbets Field in 1950: “In the middle of the city, you’re suddenly in the country. Everything is green. The uniforms were so beautiful and crisp white, and the Dodger blue in that beautiful Dodgers script."

Donna Cohen shared this with Goldberg about her first trip to Fenway Park in 1965: “We got our popcorn, we walked down the dungeon, which is the cellar area, and then all of a sudden it was like The Wizard of Oz, going from black-and-white to beautiful green grass, an amazing blue sky, and we marched ourselves right down to the fifth row.”

Most modern baseball teams now have alternate colorful jerseys. The sport’s DNA is written in color: team names (Reds, Browns, Grays, Red Sox, White Sox), icons (the Green Monster), nicknames (“Red” and “Whitey”). Even the nightmares are color-coded: one of the most notorious scandals (“Black Sox”) and its most regrettable scourge (“whites only”).

There have been players named Blue, Brown, Black, White, Green, Rose, Yellow and Lavender.

All of this adds up to this year’s edition of Newsday’s Baseball 101, an annual seminar on the game through one particular lens, using 101 examples. In the past, we have presented 101 “firsts,” 101 great nicknames, 101 memorable numbers, 101 notable replacements and 101 duos. For 2023, it is the 101 Colors of Baseball.

“Color speaks a secret language that our generation hears as white noise, an indistinct hum that we decipher unconsciously,” John Thorn, official historian for Major League Baseball, wrote in an article, “The Color of Baseball.”

Thorn pointed out that the original baseball uniform-wearers, members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, were mostly firemen who shared a pride in wearing the same shade of clothing as their comrades. Blasts of color have been with the game from the start. Thorn wrote that the Chicago White Stockings of 1876 wore “skullcaps of different colors by position played (in what a reporter termed ‘a Dutch bed of tulips’).”

Nearly a century later, the sport was upended by a colorful revolution as Kansas City A’s owner Charlie Finley introduced green and gold uniforms. In the book “Winning Ugly: A Visual History of the Most Bizarre Baseball Uniforms Ever Worn,’’ Todd Radom wrote, “Finley unleashed a plan that shook the colorless world of baseball to its core, propelling it into the jet age and changing the look of the game for always and forever.”

A person can be changed forever at the sight of a ballgame, and usually it’s the colors that get you right here. As Scott Green told Goldberg of his first experience of Yankee Stadium in 1961: “I remember looking on the field and it’s not like I hadn’t seen grass before, but this isn’t what it looked like on television. I mean television was gray and fuzzy and everything was gray and a little darker gray. Oh, my God, it’s green. Look at the dirt, it’s brown. The sky is blue. I mean, you couldn’t beat this.”

101 Colors on the Baseball Spectrum

Baseball is and always has been a vivid sport, with different shades painting its beauties, quirks and flaws. Newsday’s Baseball 101 seminar this year looks at the game through that prism. 

In today’s game, though, green is not just underfoot, it is everywhere. Green, as in the color of money. Sure, the word is metaphorical because hardly any actual cash changes hands these days, but you can’t help but get the idea.

More than $4.8 billion was spent by ballclubs on free agents this past offseason, according to Spotrac — $360 million to Aaron Judge alone. Commissioner Rob Manfred told the Los Angeles Times last fall that baseball’s gross revenue for 2022 was just shy of $11 billion. Forbes reports that multiyear TV contracts are worth $12.24 billion. And all of that doesn’t count how much money baseball generates in now-legal gambling.

Among the colors of baseball, green bats leadoff and cleanup. It is the starter and the closer.