Erik Boland: Yankees should OK players' unique pitch to wear alternate jerseys
Yankees' Aaron Judge during a spring training game on March 23, 2026, in Mesa, AZ. Credit: Getty Images/Christian Petersen
BOSTON – Wednesday’s news that some Yankees players have behind the scenes pushed team hierarchy to be able to wear alternate uniforms for the occasional road game was greeted with the predictable baying at the moon that accompanies most suggestions for change of any kind in baseball.
The story in The Athletic stated players wanted to join their peers from the 29 other teams who have alternate road uniforms, in this case the Yankees wearing their navy batting practice jerseys rather than their traditional road grays.
There was no proposal to wear anything but pinstripes at home. Slugger Giancarlo Stanton called the Yankees’ home uniform “the most iconic jersey there is in sports” before Wednesday night’s 4-1 win over the Red Sox at Fenway.
But Stanton, a Yankee since 2018, also said, “that doesn’t mean that every once in a while you can’t change something up, especially on the road.”
Aaron Boone, speaking in the visitor’s dugout before the game, said, “it’s something we’ve kind of talked about loosely for the last couple of years . . . I know it’s come up from time to time [but] that’s a decision for someone else.”
That someone else ultimately is owner Hal Steinbrenner, who has bucked franchise “tradition,” however that is defined, multiple times.
He caused a public stir early in spring training 2025 with the announcement he had axed the club’s longtime facial hair policy, instituted by his father, George, in 1976.
Hal Steinbrenner did not reply to an email from Newsday Wednesday afternoon requesting comment regarding alternative road uniforms.
Regardless, Steinbrenner, who green-lit a Nike swoosh being added to the uniform in 2020 and then a Starr Insurance patch being added as the club’s first jersey sponsor in 2023, should green-light this request by players.
Not because players should always get everything they want. The noise factory games at Yankee Stadium have become, which include sound effects after every pitch, generally is endorsed by players. No issue there, but it also amounts to a relentlessly aggressive auditory assault of Stadium fans, few of whom, young or old, asked for and one even fewer appear to enjoy.
But wearing navy instead of gray on the road occasionally?
That’s a shoulder shrug.
“I’ve got nothing for you until it happens,” captain Aaron Judge said Wednesday.
Judge, as old school as it gets when it comes to modern players, said later: “Yeah, I’m all about tradition, but we’ve got a patch on our sleeves.”
Stanton made the most significant point of the verbal kerfuffle that caused each side to retreat to their expected corners of “change is inevitable” to “whatever happened to the purity of our sports?”
“I’m sure if we were to do it and we play well, then it’s OK,” Stanton said with a smile. “We don’t play well, it’s because of this . . . we gotta play well regardless of what we’re wearing.”
Indeed.
It’s not like the Nike swoosh, which certainly caused its share of public hyperventilating, detracted or distracted from fans’ enjoyment of Judge’s pursuit of 60 homers in 2022. The insurance patch didn’t create some kind of mental asterisk that took away from the club’s run to the World Series in 2024.
And it’s not as if the players are pushing as alternative road jerseys something resembling the hideous All-Star uniforms MLB forced upon players for multiple years that looked like outfits one wears while hawking ice cream products out of a truck.
Meanwhile, the “purity of sports” reaction is always a head-scratcher. Because looking to the world of sports for purity of any kind is always misguided and guaranteed to disappoint.
People seem to always hark back and remember times as they never were. Such as a time in sports when money wasn’t the primary aim.
“Professional baseball is a business,” Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby said . . . in 1925.
Thus it has always been and always will be.
In March, the Dodgers sold naming rights to the field at Dodger Stadium to the Japanese retailer Uniqlo for a reported $125 million over five years. That historic ballpark, which opened in 1962, is now officially named “Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium.”
Wouldn’t exactly roll off the lyrical tongue of the late Vin Scully but he would have adjusted.
The Rose Bowl is currently “The Rose Bowl Game presented by Prudential.”
Non-lyrical as that may sound, it isn’t what killed what Keith Jackson long ago dubbed “the Granddaddy of them all.”
First the BCS and, in the end, the college playoff did.
And, for the vast majority of college football fans, that was a swap they were willing to make.
Is any of it progress?
In some cases, yes. In some cases, no.
But the Yankees tradition will survive the intermittent wearing of road blues rather than road grays.
Civilization will endure.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
