Volume 5, Number 23: On to the Finals!

Remember that Tigers road jersey concept I made up for the Uni Watch Design-A-Jersey contest? Well, it was evidently impressed the contest's lone judge (Alain Nina-Sinkham, the owner of Classic Old School, a company that makes custom jerseys) enough to make it to the final round of the contest, in which anyone can pick their favorite out of eighteen designs. (Alain had planned to winnow the entries down to 9 out of the 94 entries received, but decided to go with 9 for each league.)

The 18 finalists are shown in this Uni Watch blog entry. Feel free to check them all out. There are a lot of great ideas in those other 17 entries. There's a poll on that web page--please vote (the same poll can also be found at http://polldaddy.com/poll/3688854/).

The feedback I have received so far is, above all, greatly appreciated.

• Some people like how the uniform number on the right sleeve is a "tip of the cap" to the '61-'71 Tigers; others think sleeve numbers don't belong in baseball. I will stand by the sleeve numbers unless, say, 90% of the feedback I got was against it (in which case I would move it back to the left side of the front, as in the current Tigers' road jersey).
• Some like the logo I derived from the 2005 All-Star Game logo; others say "it's nothing special" and would just as soon do without it. I'm sticking with that (I like it so much better than the one they introduced in '94, which has a Tiger going through the "bars" of the Old English D--since the only way a tiger can do so is if it's paper-thin, I derisively call the '94 logo the "paper tiger logo").
• As for the "Detroit" in Old English, some people wish it was arched instead of tilted (I didn't arch it because arching only works when all of the letters in the word being arched are capitalized, and Old English doesn't look good when capitalized; hence, no arching).
• There is one thing everyone agrees on: The white outlining on the Tigers' current road jerseys, which has been in use since 1994, has got to go.

This contest has been exciting for me, from the design process to waiting for my design to be "unveiled" (last Thursday) to waiting to find out if I had made the finals (today, obviously). I have plenty of other ideas for uniform changes/tweaks/etc. in the four major pro sports, and someday I will reveal those, one at a time.

To those who have voted and those who have given me feedback, thank you.