The shortstop position was rebranded as “intermediate station,” the Saturn Rings, Mercury Fire, and Pluto Mighty Pups were added to the upper-deck standings, the public address announcer’s voice was altered to sound like an android, and even the Mariner Moose was replaced by a Mariner Martian (the Astros shipped their alien Orbit costume to Seattle, and it was decked out in M’s gear for a one-night-only, out-of-this-world appearance).įor Seattle fans already accustomed to Jay Buhner Buzz Cut Night - in a city shaped by forward-thinking Amazon, Microsoft and Costco - such an unusual promotion was a hit. Staged as if the Mariners were playing in 2027 - the 50th anniversary of the franchise - the Kingdome was rechristened the Biodome, and pregame ceremonies included an alien, a robot, a time machine, and a Starfleet officer from the USS Enterprise. At the height of his greatness and influence - when he was the reigning American League MVP - Griffey’s Mariners originated Turn Ahead The Clock night with a one-night-only event of purest science fiction in the summer of 1998. If not for Griffey, the futuristic jerseys might never have made it out of Seattle. Oddly enough, the whole thing started with the one player who managed to do both. “I think maybe they were looking forward to walking out and representing something that was in their future, as opposed to (looking like) a Hall of Famer in their club’s past.” “I think the younger, cooler baseball players were into it,” Occi said. Few were celebrated for daring to try something different. Some teams refused to participate in the promotion at all.
Occi had bigger and bolder ideas for teams that were willing to play along, and some were - the Mets reimagined themselves as a group of interstellar barnstormers with an all-new identity - but baseball is a sport that likes to look back and often struggles to think ahead. I was a little surprised they couldn’t accept that, yes.” It wouldn’t have surprised me if every one of the odd ideas had really reached and resonated with someone, but some of these were just big logos. “Particularly when (teams) went as conservative as they did. “I was very surprised (by the reaction),” Occi said.
She was Major League Baseball’s vice president of design, and she led the league’s effort to flip the tried-and-true throwback jersey on its head, imagining the game’s future instead of celebrating its past. That certainly was what Anne Occi had in mind. “And that promotion was aimed at reminding everyone that it was supposed to be fun.” “I think at times, we all have a tendency to take ourselves a little too seriously,” Twins president Dave St. Remember, baseball fans-we are only 6 years away from Turn Ahead the Clock, when all uniforms will look like this: /fADK8I5GFI The jerseys were mocked at the time, and they’re still treated with a bit of an eye roll 22 years later, but Turn Ahead The Clock jerseys sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, and in the right hands - Ken Griffey Jr.’s, for example - they were unmistakably cool in a way baseball often fails to be. In terms of breathing fresh life into the old game, though, the promotion perhaps was not as far off the rails as it seemed. Teams that included a throwback element were perhaps on the right track, but none of the Turn Ahead The Clock jerseys look anything like what teams are wearing today. In terms of predicting the future, the promotion clearly got it wrong. Those 1999 jerseys - with their cutoff sleeves, enlarged graphics, and one out-of-this-world name change - were supposed to be from the 2021 season, a year chosen because of the corporate sponsor, Century 21.
The initiative did not change the game itself, but the way the game looked - the jerseys, the logos, the tradition of it all - was radically transformed for sporadic nights of public scorn, to be ridiculed ever after.īut this is a time for re-examination, because the future Turn Ahead The Clock imagined is now. “We’ll look like Bozo the Clown out there,” Rickey Henderson said at the time.īefore electronic sign stealing and sticky-fingered spin rates, before even the Steroid Era came into focus, baseball’s most visual scandal was the Turn Ahead The Clock promotion, which had the audacity to be whimsical and imaginative in a sport that’s still not sure what to do about bats flipping through the air. That was going to be baseball in 2021, as predicted by the league in 1999. Sleeves were going to be cut, names were going to be vertical, and the Mariners were going to be red. We were promised mechanical birds, wraparound snakes and giant pirate heads.
0 kommentar(er)
