Uni Watch: Talking uniforms with Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III
From SABR member Paul Lukas at Uni Watch on November 29, 2012:
When the Cardinals recently unveiled their new home alternate jersey and announced some other uniform tweaks, the guy emceeing the event was team president Bill DeWitt III. A few hours after the unveiling, I was made aware that DeWitt happens to be a Uni Watch fan and that he’d be open to discussing the Cards’ uniforms with me. By the end of the afternoon, we were chatting on the phone.
DeWitt isn’t like any other baseball executive I’ve ever encountered. Less than two minutes into our conversation, he casually mentioned Marc Okkonen. He has a graphic arts background (as well as an MBA from Harvard), and he’s had a large role in the design of the Cardinals’ new ballpark and the team’s championship rings. As you’ll see in this transcript of our discussion, he Gets It™ — he’s one of us.
Uni Watch: How big a role did you personally have in the development of this new alternate uniform design?
Bill DeWitt III: A big one. I led the whole effort.
UW: What sorts of things did you consider along the way that ended up on the cutting room floor, so to speak?
BD: Going back a bit, when we redesigned our logos in 1998, at that time we’d been using a circular primary logo with a cartoon bird. I always thought it was crazy that we had a cartoon bird for our primary logo and a different kind of bird on our uniform. That led to a redesign of the bird, which we then used on our uniforms and for a new logo and for some other things. It was a good refresh of our brand at that time.
Read the full article here: http://www.uni-watch.com/2012/11/29/talking-uniforms-with-cardinals-president-bill-dewitt-iii/
Originally published: November 29, 2012. Last Updated: November 29, 2012.