Red Sox to retire blue alternate uniforms, introduce new City Connect in 2025
The Red Sox will make a significant change to their uniform rotation next season, introducing a new City Connect uniform while retiring the club’s old blue alternates, the team confirmed Tuesday.
The club’s current yellow and blue City Connect uniforms, which are inspired by the Boston Marathon, will remain.
“Given the popularity of our yellow uniforms with our players and fans, we have elected to keep it as a core uniform offering for the foreseeable future,” a Red Sox spokesperson said. “We will unveil a City Connect 2.0 uniform in 2025 and will no longer wear our blue alternate jerseys.”
MassLive’s Chris Cotillo was first to report the upcoming uniform changes.
The blue alternates, which have historically been worn on the road, were first introduced in 2009 and in recent years became one of the club’s most frequently worn uniforms. The Red Sox wore the navy blue tops when they clinched their most recent World Series championship in 2018, and between 2020-23 they were worn as frequently, if not more, than the traditional gray road uniforms.
That began to change this past year when the Red Sox introduced more structure to their uniform choices, wearing white or gray between Sunday and Thursday, red or blue alternates on Fridays and the yellow City Connects at home on Saturday. As a result the blues have become far less prominent.
The Red Sox will became the latest team to unveil a new City Connect, which were introduced by Nike in 2021 and aim to highlight the connection between a team and its home city. The Colorado Rockies and Washington Nationals have both announced they will be retiring their original City Connects and unveiling a new one, but the Red Sox opted for a different approach.
As for why the Red Sox can’t just introduce a new uniform and keep all of their old ones, MLB and Nike currently operate on a “four plus one” model in which clubs are allotted four core designs plus a City Connect. The yellow designs will now replace the blues in the core group.
Besides becoming wildly popular among fans, the Red Sox have typically played well wearing their yellow uniforms. Dating back to their introduction in 2021 the Red Sox are 35-13 overall when wearing them.