Fanatics have seen no shortage of criticism in their attempts to become a monolithic supplier of all major sportswear in the US. That ultimately became a problem for the company when the discourse surrounding MLB uniforms began.
In case you need a refresher, the start of MLB spring training was marked by a barrage of complaints about the league’s new uniforms. The name letters were too small. The material felt cheap. The pants were too thin. There were delivery problems for the players themselves. Some solutions have now been announced, but the problems remain.
The whole thing looked really bad for MLB, the uniform designers at Nike and the uniform makers at Fanatics, but Fanatics was the first punching bag — to the point that Fanatics founder and CEO Michael Rubin admitted to The Athletic’s Mark Lazerus that he initially assumed that his company was indeed responsible:
“My first reaction was, ‘We figured this out,’” Rubin told The Athletic.
He later made a very dramatic claim about how bad the criticism was getting:
“When you’re a well-known businessman and you’re successful, accepting abuse is a possibility,” Rubin said. “But the noise around baseball was perhaps a hundred times greater than all the noise we’ve had cumulatively in the history of our business.”
Later reporting made it quite clear what happened and it put Fanatics in a more sympathetic light. It’s easy to imagine Fanatics cutting back on uniform production for MLB, but the company was in fact in its fourth year of making MLB uniforms at the same Pennsylvania factory that Majestic used under the league’s previous production agreement .
All the changes came from Nike with what the company called the Nike Vapor Premier Jersey, which reportedly used a new fabric that was more breathable and lighter – and most likely cheaper too.
The Athletic reports that Fanatics responded to the initial backlash with several emergency meetings over a few hours and concluded that the company had followed Nike’s exact specifications.
Those specs reportedly include:
MLB later released a memo stating, “This was entirely a Nike problem,” and it will be Nike’s job to fix things in 2025 as it will be too late to salvage this in 2024. The problem with uniforms that aren’t up to par in spring training is that it’s too late to make improvements because so many jerseys have already been made.
