In honor of yesterday being Jackie Robinson Day, Jim Allen's blog post today had a couple paragraphs on why Dragons' outfielder Kenta Bright wears uniform number 42. His father is from Ghana and taught him about Robinson. Robinson became one of Bright's heroes growing up and he specifically picked Robinson's number when the Dragons drafted him in 2021. Here's a 2022 Topps NPB card (#167) of Bright that clearly shows him wearing the number:
4 comments:
Since he plays for the Dragons, whose uniforms are based on the Dodgers, its way more noticable when you see Bright wear that 42 than it would be if he played for any other team.
Kind of wish he was playing more like Robinson, he hasn't gotten a hit yet this year....
Yeah, I almost said something about the uniforms being Dodger-like but I don't like to dwell on the fact that one of my favorite NPB teams emulates the design of one of my least favorite MLB teams...
Were any of the other NPB uniforms patterned after specific MLB teams? LAD, SFG, CIN are the obvious ones, but even those seemed to happen well into the teams' histories, rather than from the outset.
There's a mook I have that was published ten years ago called something like "Professional Baseball Uniforms Encyclopedia 1936-2013". It has a page showing a bunch of comparisons between MLB (and PCL in one case) uniforms and NPB uniforms - the Astro's 80's jerseys vs the Fighters 80's jerseys; the Braves pinstripes from the late 70's vs the Swallows jerseys from around the same time; etc. There's a Carp jersey from the late 50's that was probably inspired by the Red Sox. They even compare the Marines pinstriped home jerseys to the Yankees home jerseys. It'd probably be an interesting post to do sometime although I'll have to swipe images of MLB cards from somewhere since I don't have any.
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