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^ I hope he didn't hurt himself...
The Kid Griffey Jr. wearing the BEST cleats in the Game!
- Thread in 'Nike' Thread starter Started by cincybcats22,
- Start date
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i work at Angels Stadium and saw Torii Hunters P.E.s up clse today. So Siiiiick. cant wait for the release. also gonna be bold and ask him if i can have themwhen he is done with em. It worked with Gary Matthews Jr. he gave me his coop IVs last year!!!
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^ For those wondering...
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il see him on Wednesday morning when he gets to the stadium and ask him about em' if the convo is goin good il ask him what hes gonna do with them when hesdone with em' hehehe. ONLY ASKIN CUZ IVE TALKED TO HIM SEVERAL TIMES. he seems pretty damn cool. woder how many pairs he got...hmmm gotta ask.
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any new photos of the other guys that have em? thx i bet Grif Wears the Public Release colors tonite. any new news on that guys? im a Semi Pro player and igotta get my hands on as many of them as possible
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^ nice... I hope you do get a pair of those... if not, at least some hi-rez detailed pics!
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What kind of batting gloves does Hunter have on?
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^ Sick Torrii PEs!
Seeing Griff on the Sox is going to take some getting used to....
Seeing Griff on the Sox is going to take some getting used to....
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really good article -
[h1]Looking back at the Mariners' futuristic night [/h1]
By Paul Lukas
Page 2
(Archive | Contact)
Updated: July 21, 2008, 6:29 PM ET
In sports, there are moments when time stands still. And thanks tothrowback uniforms, there are plenty of junctures where time appearsto turn backward. But it's rare when time jumps ahead.
That photo, of course, is from MLB's now-infamous "Turn Aheadthe Clock" promotion, which featured 20 big league teams
But here's something most people don't realize: The 1999 futuristic series, which stretched out from late June through mid-September, was based on asingle futuristic game from 1998. That game, between the Marinersand Royals, took place in Seattle exactly 10 years ago Friday. Itwas a fun little promotion designed to be a one-game thing, and the guy who came up with the idea never realized or intended for itto be expanded into an MLB-wide program the following year.
That guy is Kevin Martinez, who was the Mariners' marketing director at the time (now he's the VP of marketing). Ten years later, he looks back onthe Mariners' turn-ahead-the-clock night as one of the most memorable things he's ever been involved in.
"My boss and I would often sit around during home games and come up with these what-if scenarios," Martinez recalls. "One day it was,'What if we went into the future?' And we looked at each other and thought that might work. There had been several 'Turn Back theClock' days -- we just wanted to put a new twist on it. Playing inside the Kingdome, a controlled environment, we thought we could change the look and feelinside the building to give it a futuristic tone. So we chose to fast-forward to the year 2027, because that would be the 50th anniversary of Marinersbaseball."
Martinez, an unusually accessible executive, generously agreed to provide an account of how those first futuristic uniforms came about. So here's thebackstory, in his own words:
Anytime we're going to do something that affects the game, it's always been our practice to share it with a few of the more veteran guys, just so it isn't a surprise to them. So we went to Ken Griffey Jr. with the idea. He liked the concept and got the other players excited about the event. Junior even played a large role in designing our uniforms -- he suggested the brick-red color along with black and silver, and he suggested that the tops be vests.
We decided to keep both teams' logos the same, because we knew it would be a bigger deal, especially to the Royals, if we tried changing them. All we did was enlarge each team's logo on the jerseys, caps, and helmets. As for the rest of the design, we had someone in-house who worked with Majestic to create the uniforms. Frankly, we didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. The only direction we gave them was basically, "Here are the colors we want the Mariners uniforms to be, and the Royals should keep their current colors. We want these to be vests, we want them to be shiny, we want them to look tech-y -- and now you get to tell us what we mean by that."
Ben Van Houten
According to projections, the Royals' payroll will be all the way up to $25 million by 2027.
There's no getting around it: They were gaudy. But we were trying to do what we could without adjusting the basic format of a baseball uniform. For example, we weren't going to use a unitard or anything else that might be so different that it would put our players at a competitive disadvantage.
The Royals were fantastic to work with. They agreed to participate in the event when we were still in the concept stage, before the uniforms were even designed. We shared their uniform design with them early on in the '98 season, and we also shared our own design, so they knew both teams were going to look similar.
When Junior arrived on the day of the game, he simply took over. He decided the jerseys looked better untucked. I told him I disagreed and that the team, especially the pitcher, could not play with their jerseys untucked. Junior responded, "Didn't the White Sox play with untucked jerseys in the 1970s?" He had me there.
Junior then went on to say that the team was going to play with their caps backward. I told him, "Junior, no team has ever done that -- it will make us look like a softball team." He just flashed that smile of his and said, "It's the future, Kev -- anything is possible!"
Turns out Junior was just getting started. He'd brought a couple of cans of silver spray paint to the park with him and was walking around the clubhouse spray-painting his teammates' shoes and some of their gloves. He also decided that the red undershirt sleeves were too long, so he went around to each guy and cut the sleeves, Ted Kluszewski-style. We were truly "Sleeveless in Seattle." (Dan Wilson, however, did not cut his sleeves, so he looked more like how the uniforms were designed to look.)
It was great to see all the players having fun with it, but I was coming unglued. But in the end it was like, "Well, this isn't quite what we designed, but so be it. It's gonna be one of those nights."
The umpires (who wore metallic silver shirts of their own) wouldn't let our pitcher -- I believe it was Kenny Cloude -- wear the untucked jersey or the backward cap, but everyone else did, at least at first. And sure enough, with two outs in the top of the second inning, a ball was hit deep into the left-center gap, and Junior -- with his cap on backward, his jersey untucked, his glove painted silver, and metallic silver Nike shoes -- made a classic Griffey catch, running into the wall.
After a few innings, I think the Royals' manager, Tony Muser, argued that the untucked jerseys gave our hitters an unfair advantage, because they could more easily be nicked by a pitch, so we had to tuck them in for the rest of the game.
As Martinez's promotion unfolded on the field, one interested observer in attendance was current ESPN.com baseball columnist Rob Neyer, a lifelongRoyals fan who was living in Seattle at the time. "I have to say, from my perch in the upper deck, the Royals' jerseys really didn't look sobad," he recalls. "They were sleeveless, which I've always liked, and nicely complemented by coordinated undershirts. I don't mind canaryyellow when it's accompanied by royal blue."
As is often the case with promotional uniforms, the futuristic jerseys were being auctioned off after the game, so Neyer decided to bid on one of them. Hefigured he couldn't afford Johnny Damon's, so for $75 he ended up with Jose Rosado's (here's a rear view). But he could never quite bring himself to wear it, so it sat in his closetfor nine years until he donated it to be raffled off on the Uni Watch blog last September (a raffle thatdidn't take place until a certain uniform columnist gave the jersey a quick test-drive). It now belongs to Uni Watch reader Ryan Etgen.
Ben Van Houten
Ken Griffey Jr. didn't just run with this idea, he ran around the field with his hat on backward and a can of silver spray paint.
But the uniforms were just part of the story that night in Seattle. In order to provide the proper context, Martinez and his team also made someadjustments inside the Kingdome -- or, rather, the Biodome, as it was renamed for the evening. Here are some of the other special provisions they made:
• The ball for the ceremonial first pitch was delivered to the mound by a robot, which was constructed at the University of Washington. "We named therobot Mr. Scraps, because it looked like a garbage can on wheels," recalls Martinez. "Not exactly what we were expecting, but it served itspurpose."
• The first pitch was thrown by James Doohan, who played Scotty on "Star Trek." He made his way out to the mound in a DeLorean that entered the Biodome through lasers and dry ice in the left-fieldtunnel.
• "You might remember that the Kingdome had standings banners hanging off the upper deck," says Martinez. "On this night, we added three newteams to those standings banners: the Pluto Mighty Pups, theSaturn Rings and the Mercury Fire. We even included an Interplanetary game on the out-of-town scoreboard. Ibelieve Saturn (SAT) took on Mercury (MER)."
• A futuristic 50th-anniversary Mariners logo was placed on theoutfield wall. "We got ripped by some people who thought it looked like '5 degrees' instead of '50,' but hey, it was the future, theywere using tiny zeroes," says Martinez. "In hindsight, it would have been really cool to use the logo as a sleeve patch, but we didn't think ofthat."
• The outfield wall sponsor signage was changed to have a morefuturistic feel.
• The Mariners borrowed the Astros' mascot, Orbit, for the game. "The Astros were kind enough to let us deck him out in futuristic Mariners colors," says Martinez. "Mariner Moose lovers werebeside themselves."
• All the lights in the Biodome were turned out for the pregamelineup introductions, which were done on the video screen with accompanying lasers and pyrotechnics. A synthesizer was added to the PA system, so theannouncer sounded like a computer as he introduced the batters.
• The team gave away replica futuristic Mariners caps to thefans. "We still see some of those caps during games at Safeco Field," says Martinez.
Ben Van Houten
Forget about West Coast trips, the road games to Pluto would be a bear.
In the end, the night was a success: Over 42,000 people attended, and most of them who weren't named Rob Neyer were happy to see the Mariners win8-5. At baseball's fall business meetings, Martinez took home the award for Best Promotion of the Year (the trophy -- a silver baseball -- still sits onhis bookshelf).
And that, Martinez figured, was the end of that. "We had no plans to do it again," he says. "It was always conceived as just a one-time thingfor us."
Now, if you lead anything approaching an observant life, you've probably noticed, as Uni Watch has, the unfortunate American tendency to take a nicelittle idea and blow it up into a big awful idea. So you probably won't be surprised to learn that the MLB brain trust set up a meeting with Martinez andhis staff shortly after the '98 season.
"They came in and wanted to understand what we did, sort of like a fact-finding mission," he says. "At the end of the meeting, they said,'We like what you've done here, and we may pitch it to a potential sponsor.' And we said, 'Great, go for it.' We were happy to see it gonational."
You know what happened after that. MLB sold the concept to Century 21 and gave us the futuristic series in 1999. But a concept that was goofy yet charmingfor one night became a bad joke when transmogrified into an extendedvehicle for corporate sponsorship. It didn't help that most of the 1999 uniforms recycled the same design concept over and over again.
Still, Martinez's original idea was a clever one, and it deserves better than to be lumped in with its unfortunate spawn. Ten years later to the day,it's time to recognize July 18 as a national holiday -- if not on the official American calendar, then certainly on Uni Watch's.
(Special thanks to Mariners team photographer Ben Van Houten for many of the 1998 photos.)
Friendly Reminder
Four design writers, including Page 2's very own uniform columnist, will be presenting a series of "Sports and Design" readings next Tuesday,July 22, at KGB Bar in Manhattan. Topics will include stadium architecture's tendency toward nostalgia,Nike's new uniforms for the Chinese Olympic team, the odd connections between signature sneakers and cars, and the cultural history of the baseball cap.Festivities begin at 7 p.m., admission is free, and all New York-area readers are encouraged to attend. For additional details, look here.
Paul Lukas has never fully recovered from seeing his favorite teamdressed as the Mercury Mets in 1999. His Uni Watch blog, which isupdated daily, is here, his answers to Frequently Asked Questions are here, and his Page 2 archive is here. Want to learn about his Uni Watch membership program, be added to his mailing list so you'll always know whena new column has been posted, or just ask him a question? Contact him here.
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Diamond Elite BP. they occasionally show up on ebay sometimes, probably about 2 years old now.
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mercury mets pic with Orel Hershiser! spectacular!
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im prolly madd late, but are the griffey cleats going to get released
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^ Yes. October.
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any official release locations???aka footlocker, eastbay, ect
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It really looks like these were made for the White Sox uni, but they weren't... He wore these with the Reds, but they look even better here.
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yo mark, could you PS a royal/black/silver remix. thx! release is oct 10. but where???
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^ I've got my plate full with PS work right now, and I'm guessing they'll be in Eastbay and most other stores that sell Nike's full baseballlineup. It's not like a limited release or anything exclusive...
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^^ damn that last Jr pic shows a pretty familiar sight here lately... 1-6 today with 3 K's
M!ke
M!ke
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real quick... i feal like a *%!$$%@ cause i cant find the shoes i want but what are the old griffeys with the long nike swoosh velcro strap goin from top toopposite bottom??? cant find them nor the name... any help?!?!?!
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Air Griffey Max III (1998 season)
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i have a pair of those in plastics, they were extremely comfortable but the bottom started to come unglued after one practice this year, they just sit inmy closet now.
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co sign
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I assume you're talking about cleats? I use a pair occasionally as well in practices and I think even our first game, although theyare breaking down pretty bad. I'm still kicking myself for passing on a pair of (used) AGM 1's for like $25
M!ke
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the agm 1's are some of the best looking cleats i've ever seen, not to rub it in or anything haha, i've always loved all his cleats but theGriffey gd ii's i think are what they're called, have always been my favorites, especially with the long pants that go overOriginally Posted by AmericanDream
I assume you're talking about cleats? I use a pair occasionally as well in practices and I think even our first game, although they are breaking down pretty bad. I'm still kicking myself for passing on a pair of (used) AGM 1's for like $25ah well, I'll stock up on the ReMax's...
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Originally Posted by pokeyneil30
the agm 1's are some of the best looking cleats i've ever seen, not to rub it in or anything haha, i've always loved all his cleats but the Griffey gd ii's i think are what they're called, have always been my favorites, especially with the long pants that go overOriginally Posted by AmericanDream
I assume you're talking about cleats? I use a pair occasionally as well in practices and I think even our first game, although they are breaking down pretty bad. I'm still kicking myself for passing on a pair of (used) AGM 1's for like $25ah well, I'll stock up on the ReMax's...
no doubt man, I def feel you on that. I actually had a pair a few years ago, in my size even, but couldn't passup an opportunity for some insane profit. to this day, my pair went for a bout double what any other pair has, and mine didn't even have a box
EDIT: dont mind the watermark, old screenname...
M!ke
