Paul Lukas with Kevin Garnett, form of.
Picture: Courtesy of Paul Lukas
Two years in the past, the Mets unveiled a ten-foot-tall statue of Tom Seaver close to the principle entrance of Citi Discipline. It depicted the staff icon in a traditional Seaver pose: mid-pitch, along with his again knee so low to the bottom it’s about to scrape the filth. The statue was successful with followers, who had been clamoring for a everlasting tribute to the best of Mets pitchers, and the ceremony was a uncommon feel-good second for the benighted franchise and its newish proprietor.
However not everybody was fully happy. A couple of weeks later, performing on a reader tip, journalist Paul Lukas revealed a narrative mentioning a tiny flaw on the statue: The “4” on Bronze Tom Seaver’s jersey didn’t embody a stub extending off the correct aspect of the numeral, because it does in Block Normal, the one font the Mets have ever used on their pinstriped house uniform. The error, as minute because it was, performed into the narrative of Mets haplessness, and the story acquired some traction within the mainstream press. It culminated with Chris Christie opining that Lukas ought to “get a life” throughout an look on WFAN.
For anybody not accustomed to Lukas and his life’s work, this may need appeared like an train in excessive nitpickery. However for readers of his Uni Watch column, which debuted in 1999 and can publish its remaining version on Sunday, it was a valedictory achievement. Amongst this obsessive crowd, the story of a lacking stub on a statue’s numeral certified as a significant scoop.
In launching his column, Lukas all however invented a brand new beat in sports activities journalism, one targeted fully on participant uniforms, logos, and different associated bits of design — what he calls “athletics aesthetics.” His work by means of the years has taken many varieties: essential assessments of recent uniform units, essays on traits, subject journeys to uni-notable locations, and interviews with tools managers, Nike designers, and the occasional sports-uniform-adjacent determine. He has launched investigations into which Yankee wore probably the most pinstripes on his jersey or why Invoice Buckner was sporting the wristband of a distinct cursed franchise when he made his notorious error within the 1986 World Sequence. Do you know that late Orioles supervisor Earl Weaver had a pocket for his cigarettes sewn into his jersey? Uni Watch readers do.
“Individuals who found Uni Watch, they tended to interact with it quite a bit, very emphatically,” says Lukas. “I heard over and over individuals saying, ‘I’m so glad I encountered your work. I believed I used to be the one one.’ That’s a pleasant and gratifying factor to listen to, that folks really feel that sense of neighborhood. They suppose they’re the one weirdo on the market, but it surely turns on the market’s a complete bunch of weirdos.”
Earlier than he started the column, Lukas would typically discover himself commenting on little particulars of the uniforms he noticed on TV, like teammates with sleeves of various lengths — hardly the bread and butter of televised sports activities protection. His girlfriend on the time prompt he might use an outlet for these ideas. Lukas had written extensively on client tradition in a zine known as Beer Body and different publications (together with New York), and he’d additionally executed some writing for design magazines. He preferred the concept of writing about uniforms, however he didn’t wish to create a design column about sports activities; slightly, he wished to jot down a sports activities column about design.
Lukas offered the Village Voice on his concept, and his first column ran on Could 26, 1999, with a take a look at that season’s uniform adjustments in Main League Baseball. When the Voice shut down its quirky sports activities part in 2003, Uni Watch moved briefly to Slate earlier than discovering a house at ESPN in 2004, the place it grew to prominence as a part of the off-kilter “Web page 2” part, which made Invoice Simmons a star and revealed Hunter S. Thompson in his remaining years. In 2006, Lukas based his personal web site to complement his ESPN columns; he’d take his writing there full-time after being laid off in 2019 by each ESPN and Sports activities Illustrated. In recent times, his uniform-writing empire grew to incorporate a subscription e-newsletter.
The extra Lukas wrote, the clearer it turned that there was an viewers for the slightly area of interest content material he was placing out. Sports activities followers might at all times examine how their groups performed, however the ones who additionally cared about how they regarded had nowhere to go till Uni Watch got here alongside.
Jerry Seinfeld famously joked that sports activities followers are finally simply rooting for laundry. He meant it as commentary on how athletes are perpetually switching groups, however lots of people genuinely do care concerning the laundry itself. A uniform is usually a through-line bridging generations of gamers. It may set the tone for a franchise, whether or not it’s seeking to convey custom, or enjoyable, or minimalistic cool. (A foul design, in the meantime, is usually a level of disgrace for a staff’s supporters.) And to design-minded sports activities followers, uniforms exist on the nexus of their pursuits.
“I simply thought it was beautiful that there was truly someone writing about this with some thought,” says Todd Radom, a designer and writer who created the logos for groups just like the Washington Nationals and Los Angeles Angels, in addition to for particular occasions like Tremendous Bowl XXXVIII. “He was the primary to offer voice to this curiosity, the primary to offer voice to this neighborhood. I believe he supplied the template for lots of different individuals who adopted.”
Through the years, readers would develop to know Lukas’s likes (stirrups, chain-stitching) and dislikes (uniform adverts, the colour purple). And the feedback part of his web site would function a discussion board for like-minded obsessives who grew up doodling logos of their notebooks throughout class and by no means stopped listening to the trivialities of sports activities design. In Uni Watch parlance, these are the individuals who “Get It.” Via the years, Lukas has issued greater than 3,400 membership playing cards to readers who’ve shelled out a couple of bucks for a card designed like their favourite’s staff’s jersey. (Full disclosure: I’m certainly one of them.)
With Lukas having proved there’s a marketplace for such commentary, others joined him on the beat. SportsLogos.internet, previously a repository of, nicely, sports activities logos, has added day by day information tales. Icethetics.com gives obsessive protection of hockey logos and uniforms. And mainstream writers routinely report on uniform information in a sports activities world chock stuffed with brand adjustments, alternate jerseys, and flashy reveals. Certainly, Lukas is strolling away from the beat throughout maybe probably the most mainstream uniform story of his profession: the disastrous rollout of Nike’s new baseball uniforms, with their tiny lettering and their sweaty, mismatched materials.
“Seeing an internet site like ESPN masking common uniform information was a fairly large deal,” says Chris Creamer, the founding father of SportsLogos.internet, who briefly co-hosted a podcast with Lukas known as Unified. “You return and also you learn previous newspaper articles, and a staff would launch a brand new uniform and the headline can be, ‘New York Jets Announce Season Ticket Costs, Additionally Present Off New Uniform.’ It was buried within the story.”
Lukas, 60, isn’t retiring from writing altogether. He nonetheless plans to cowl meals, journey, and minutiae-centric matters on Substack, and he’ll additionally preserve possession of the Uni Watch web site, which can now be managed by Phil Hecken, the present deputy editor.
Earlier than he shifts into his post-uniform life, the Brooklyn-based Lukas has been touring the nation to have fun his run with readers, with events in Baltimore, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, all main as much as a bash on Sunday at New York’s Bowery Electrical. The hockey-themed band the Zambonis will play that farewell occasion — in customized Uni Watch jerseys, in fact.
“What I at all times say about Uni Watch is that not everyone cares about these items, however the individuals who do care about it actually fucking care about it,” says Lukas. “And so I’m blessed. I’m fortunate to have such an engaged and passionate viewers.”
