The New York Mets officially announced that the team will wear their 1986 throwback uniforms for every Sunday home game at Citi Field this season.
Original Report
In honor of the 30th anniversary of their last World Championship, the Mets will wear their 1986 uniforms multiple times throughout this season, according to Adam Rubin of ESPN New York.
The original design of those iconic 1986 uniforms were he brainchild of die-hard Met fan and acclaimed artist Joe Petruccio, who does a brilliant job of documenting each Mets season day by day in his artistic NY Mets Journal.
Original sketch submitted to Mets by Joe Petruccio
For the full story on how it all came about, I urge you to check out this fantastic interview Joe did for the fine folks at Uni Watch. Here’s a small sampling.
Joe Petruccio: It’s kind of weird. When I was in high school in the 1970s, I loved the Astros’ uniforms, and I basically noticed that all the teams were changing their uniforms except the Mets. So I called the Mets and said, “Who’s in charge of uniforms?” and they said it was this guy named Jim Nagourney. So I would do drawings of new uniform designs and send them to him. I did this for a couple of years.
UW: Did he ever respond?
JP: No. But I kept sending them in anyway, until I went to college. Then, after college, I was working for Della Famina, the ad agency that had the account for lots of Mets advertising. One day I was up at Shea Stadium, and they said, “Why don’t you take a shot at doing a new uniform for us? Nothing too drastic, but see what you can come up with.” So I did a few sketches and brought them back to Shea for them to see, and they bring in this guy to take a look at them — Jim Nagourney.
I knew the Mets were planning on having the team wear these bright and colorful 1986 uniforms for the three-day celebration of that amazing World Series team, but that we’ll be seeing the players wearing them throughout the regular season is beyond awesome. I can’t wait to see Syndergaard or deGrom dealing while wearing those orange and blue racing stripes. This offseason just keeps getting better and better.
Follow Joe Petruccio on Instagram and on Twitter at @RocknRollArtist.
