How Many Characters Can You Cram on a Major League Uniform?

On Monday night, I sat down to watch the Red Sox-Rays game, hoping to find the answer to a question that’s been bugging me for weeks: Who does Shane Baz look like?

I didn’t come close to an answer, because while watching Baz pitch, I was struck by the sparseness of the young right-hander’s uniform. Only three letters in his name; two digits in his uniform number, but represented by skinny numerals. It stood out on the Rays’ classy blue-on-white uniforms. (Some say it’s boring and/or derivative, but I disagree — it’s a color scheme that’ll never steer you wrong in baseball.)

Then I lost the plot a little. The Rays don’t have a jersey sponsor, and their sleeve patch doesn’t contain any script. Their team name is only four letters long. How close does Baz come to having the fewest characters on his uniform of any major league player?

I was instantly fixated on this question, to the point where I stopped paying attention to the game altogether. By the time I looked at the TV, I was quite startled to discover that Tampa Bay had tagged Tanner Houck for 12 runs in 2 1/3 innings, but I had bigger problems now.

After about 45 seconds — or, 40 seconds longer than it should’ve taken — I remembered that the Yankees don’t have player names on their uniforms. There’s a simple two-letter logo on the front of the home jersey, the same logo on the cap, and the uniform number on the back. Marcus Stroman wears no. 0, giving him only five characters on his uniform. With every other single-digit number out of circulation, all of his teammates are tied for second with six.

OK, but that’s no fun. The Yankees are kind of cheating here by not putting names on the uniforms. Here at FanGraphs, we’re not into the erasure of the self, so the search goes on.

Baz is one of 13 players who’s appeared in the majors this year and has a three-letter last name. Of those 13 players, three — Gavin Lux, Korey Lee, and Ji Hwan Bae — also have a single-digit uniform number, giving them four total characters on the back of the jersey.

At the other end of the spectrum, last names get pretty long. (For the purposes of this exercise, I’m counting punctuation marks as characters, but not diacritical marks or spaces.):

The back of a player’s jersey could demand only one character, in Stroman’s case, or 20, in Encarnacion-Strand’s. The latter, in fact, has so many letters the Reds only put the first half of his hyphenated last name on his jersey, though the Twins shelled out for both ends of Woods Richardson’s name, the Cubs for Crow-Armstrong’s, and so forth. But so much of each player’s letter count has to do with the team’s uniform. Some clubs put numbers on the front of their jerseys; others don’t. Some have a logo on their cap or their jersey; others spell out the name of the city, which in cases like “San Francisco” and “Washington” can stretch out longer than the majority of surnames in the league.

Nine clubs have at least one uniform combination that includes a total of two characters between the hat and jersey logo. In seven of those cases, there’s no uniform number on the front. The Rays’ light blue alternate uniforms, with the starburst logo instead of the Rays wordmark, is one of those combinations. So Baz doesn’t have the most sparsely worded uniform in the league, but he’s not far from it:

The Tigers and Diamondbacks have among the most parsimonious home uniforms — one letter each on the jersey and cap, no number on the front — but once you start breaking out the alternate uniforms, things get a quite verbose. The Tigers’ City Connect uniforms, for instance, feature 16 letters without any player identifiers whatsoever. This, thanks to the inexplicable decision to write out “MOTOR CITY” on the jersey and “DETROIT” on the cap.

In the past couple rounds of City Connect uniforms, the side of the hat has become fertile ground for typographical cultivation. The Twins, for example, have “10000 LAKES” on the side of their hat. The jersey logo has only two letters, and there’s no text on the front of the cap. That means that when a Twin with a short name, say, Bailey Ober, takes the field, 55% of the type on his uniform is devoted to reminding everyone of the Super Bowl commercial about how owning a Volkswagen is so joyful it makes white guys talk in a Jamaican accent.

The Dodgers’ City Connects, however, are just incredibly wordy: Number on the front, spelling out “Los Angeles” on the uniform, a three-letter logo as opposed to the typical two-letter Dodgers insignia… it all adds up.

If we’re limiting ourselves to just the cap and front and back of jersey (wow, that caveat came out of nowhere; I wonder if that’s about to come back in a really annoying way a couple ‘grafs down the line), there’s a three-way tie for most densely populated uniform between the three Dodger players with nine-letter surnames and two-digit uniform numbers:

League-wide, 29 of the 30 wordiest uniforms in baseball this season have belonged to Dodgers players in City Connects. The only exception is Woods Richardson, who has a double-barreled last name and plays for a club that puts a very long place name, plus numbers, on the front of their road jersey. Even on Detroit’s City Connects, Spencer Torkelson and Zach McKinstry have the same number of total characters as Blake Snell and Dustin May have in the Dodgers’ equivalent. In short, a player’s sartorial wordiness is mostly determined by what team he plays for and what uniform his club is wearing at a given moment.

That’s a fun bit of trivia, isn’t it? And if I’d had an ounce of sense, that’s where I would’ve stopped. Instead, I remembered that player and team names aren’t the only words on the uniforms. Every team in baseball puts at least one patch on the sleeve of the uniform. Sometimes it’s an advertisement, other times it’s a team logo, sometimes a memorial or other commemorative emblem, sometimes three or four.

The Giants have five uniforms and four different club logo patches, plus an advertising patch. The A’s have no club logo patch, but they do have an advertisement for Las Vegas on one sleeve and a patch honoring their temporary home in Sacramento, plus a memorial patch for the late Rickey Henderson. And what a deliciously symbolic combination that is. The Mariners’ jersey sponsor, Nintendo, has different ads for the club’s home and road jerseys, a first in Major League Baseball.

Where the patch gets applied can be inconsistent, which drove me a little nuts while researching this piece. It’s pretty common for the ad patch to be fixed to whichever sleeve faces the pitcher while the player is batting, so left-handed hitters get it on the right sleeve, and vice-versa. Aesthetically, I find that a little obnoxious but at least, as the saying goes, it’s an ethos.

Then, I was cycling through photos of recent Colorado Rockies games, looking for a clear shot of their sleeve patch, and I found what could only have been a mistake. Tyler Kinley had a patch on his right sleeve, while Jimmy Herget had a patch on his left, in the same game, despite both of them being right-handed pitchers, who don’t hit at all. At this point, I got up and had to go take a walk.

In case you didn’t know where this was going, I counted up all the letters on every regular uniform patch I could find and added those characters to the figure for total uniform verbosity.

Even I had limits; I only counted from the head to the waist and elbows, and I did not include manufacturer logos — Nike and New Era — which are the same for every team. I also didn’t count words on individual player gear; every glove and bat has the manufacturer’s name on it, and frequently the player’s name. Players who hit with elbow guards often have their name printed in big letters on the elastic-and-velcro strap, for the same reason grade school soccer players put their names on their water bottles.

It’s also increasingly common for teams to include what I’d call Easter eggs on their uniforms, especially flashy special-purpose uniforms like the City Connects. Most of them have some slogan under the collar; the Astros have an excerpt from John F. Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University sewn onto the jersey near the tag. (“We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard…”) That part, which is too small to see from the stands anyway, gets tucked into the uniform pants.

Speaking of pants, the Astros’ City Connects have “HTX” stitched into one of the belt loops. The Pirates have “Pittsburgh Pirates” on their belt loops. When I was young, and guys like Chipper Jones and Jim Thome made it cool to play with high socks, you were mostly showing a solid color. Stirrups were considered three-car-garage-level fancy, and stripes, well, stripes were downright lascivious.

Today’s socks can have all manner of logos, patterns, slogans, what have you. Maybe I’ll go back and count it all someday, but that day is not today. Jerseys and caps only.

Factoring in the various patches took some doing, because some of them are as long as a novella. What’s the wordiest patch in baseball? Believe it or not, it’s open to interpretation:

The sleeve patch on the Phillies’ City Connect uniforms reads “Philadelphia: City of Brotherly Love.”

Some smaller details on the Phillies City Connect unis

– Skyline inside the Liberty Bell on the cap

-Liberty bell cracks inside the “Philly” script across the chest

– City of Brotherly Love patch on sleeve@PhilliesNation @UniWatch @PhilHecken pic.twitter.com/NHwUl8muyD

— Tim Kelly (@TimKellySports) April 5, 2024

As you can see, “Love” is spelled out like famous Robert Indiana sculpture that sits in Love Park (officially John F. Kennedy Plaza; JFK is getting a real workout with these uniforms) at the end of the Ben Franklin Parkway. Only the “O” in “Love” has been replaced by an image of the Liberty Bell. Which feels a little unnecessary to me, jamming the two most recognizable items in Center City into one image. If they were really trying, they could’ve crammed “Bolt of Lightning…A Memorial to Benjamin Franklin” into that patch somehow.

Anyway, that patch has 30 letters on it if you don’t count the bell as an O, 31 if you do. The Angels’ 30-letter jersey ad for Foundation Building Materials spells out the company’s entire name and initialism, making it completely inscrutable to anyone more than five feet away. (Even David Ogilvy thinks that ad is a little wordy.) The other 30-letter ad belongs to the Giants, who wear a “San Francisco Giants Baseball Club” patch on their home and road uniforms.

This gets pretty wordy once you start stacking patches, which some teams do. The Nationals have a patch for their team logo, which includes both team and city name. For this season, they’re also celebrating 20 years in Washington with a 29-character patch on the side of their caps. The Nationals, Phillies, and Angels, therefore, can all stack almost 50 characters’ worth of patches on a single uniform. Patches included, that leaves us with seven big leaguers who wear more than 70 characters on their uniform:

One side effect of jersey ads is the Yankees getting knocked off their perch. The team that otherwise wears the most laconic uniforms in baseball has Starr Insurance’s 14-letter sponsor patch on its jersey. That means that once you count patches, Stroman has 19 characters on his sparsest uniform, placing him in a tie for 306th out of the 885 players who have appeared in the majors so far this season.

Stroman’s 19-character home jersey sounds pretty ostentatious when there are 10 players out there who can dress for work in seven or eight characters:

The Rays’ logo-fronted alternate jerseys, with no sponsor, and the Cubs’ one-letter sponsor patch on their blue road alternates, allow players to get in with a fraction of the letters required to dress your average Nationals player for a road game.

I take particular pride in the first name on that list, because after two days’ worth of research, it turns out I was right all along. Baz does have the least-wordy jersey in baseball, even if the Rays weren’t wearing the right tops at the time. Now I just have to figure out who he looks like. It’s killing me.