PHILADELPHIA -- Last month, in a white tent outside the clubhouse at BayCare Ballpark in Clearwater, Fla., five Phillies participated in a photoshoot.
It was a hush-hush operation.
Bryce Harper, Trea Turner, J.T. Realmuto, Bryson Stott and José Alvarado modeled the Phillies’ new Nike City Connect uniforms, which will be unveiled at 10 a.m. on Friday at the team store at Citizens Bank Park and on social media. The Phillies will wear the new uniforms for the first time on April 12.
“I’m pretty excited about ours,” Stott said late last month.
“They’re beautiful,” Alvarado said.
Beautiful? Really?
“Yes,” Alvarado said.
Why?
“It’s something new, it’s something different for the city,” he said.
The Phillies currently have four sets of uniforms: home red pinstripes, home creams, home powder blues and road grays. The City Connect uniforms will be the fifth. If they are like Nike’s City Connects for other teams, they will be unlike anything Philadelphia fans have seen. We asked the five players at the photoshoot for their opinions about them. They agreed to share their thoughts, as long as they didn’t reveal specific details.
“I really like them,” Harper said. “I think this is going to be something that is very cool for everybody. I think once people see the jersey and the entire uniform, they’re going to like the look. They’ll like how it all comes together.”
“They’re the City Connects, so they are supposed to be different and a lot different than anything you have,” Stott said. “I think they’re cool. There are some cool accents and fonts and stuff that I really like.”
The Phillies have tried to keep the City Connects under wraps until Friday’s launch, but they learned this winter that some things are out of their control.
Back in January, somebody posted a midnight blue Zack Wheeler jersey on eBay. It looked like an authentic jersey. It looked like legit packaging. Nobody had seen a Phils jersey like that before. Fans and uniform junkies speculated that it might be the Phillies’ City Connect, which had been rumored to incorporate some elements of the City of Philadelphia flag.
The club has declined comment on the authenticity of the eBay jersey, which was removed almost immediately from the site.
Realmuto said he didn’t know about the eBay brouhaha. He just knows what he thinks about the uniform he modeled in Clearwater.
“Some of the colors are pretty cool,” he said.
He said he had reservations when he first saw mockups of it, “just because they’re very different. But once I put them on, it’s a cool look. I like them. I’d like to wear them a few times. It’s not something I’d wear every day, because they’re definitely different, but I think it’ll be cool to wear them for a few games every year.”
The Phillies said they will wear them for all 12 Friday home games.
“I like our uniforms in general,” Turner said. “I think we have cool, classic stuff, so I think to add some flair to that will be cool. We’ve got a lot of colors going on [with the five uniforms]. We’ve got the creams, we’ve got the pinstripes, we’ve got the throwbacks. It’s a lot, but I think it’s pretty cool. I think they did a good job. I just hope the fans like them. Really, that’s kind of why we’re doing them, right? For me, if the fans like them, I think that means more to me than what I think.”