Ever since their inception, purple has been the identifying color of the Colorado Rockies. It's a nod to the lyric "for purple mountain majesties" from the song "America the Beautiful." No other team in the league uses purple as a trademark color.
There's been one small problem though: the Rockies have worn several different shades of purple over the years, often at the same time. Their cap would be one shade and their jersey another shade. Here's Nolan Arenado modeling for us:
It might be difficult to see, but the brim of the cap is a lighter shade of purple than the jersey. It absolutely is. I know it is because the Rockies themselves have admitted it, and they've corrected the problem.
According to MLB.com's Thomas Harding, the Rockies have selected one specific shade of purple for the team going forward. It covers everything. Caps, jerseys, logos, catcher's equipment, the pantsless mascot, the whole nine. Here's more from Harding:
"The purple that we had, the issue was for something that's such a part of our core -- the Rockies and purple are synonymous -- that purple had a lot of variance," Rockies director of retail operations Aaron Heinrich said. "So this isn't a change -- that kind of symbolizes breaking away, a rebrand. We are defining a Rockies purple that we can use -- one that is communicated consistently on-field, one that we believe looks good over the media when you see it on TV, and one that we can be consistent with."
...
"Just watching us on games, at different parks it looked different based on the lighting in the ballpark," Heinrich said. "In some ballparks, it looked like we were wearing blue. In some ballparks it was a dark purple."
Harding provided a photo of the team's new shade of purple. The new shade is on the left. The old shades are on the right. You can really see the difference between the brim of the cap and the jersey we were talking about earlier here:
Keeping a color consistent across different manufacturers -- New Era makes caps, Majestic makes jerseys, etc. -- is not always easy, and the Rockies ran into some trouble with their shade of purple. Now their team color will remain the same on all platforms, at least until Under Armour takes over as the league's jersey provider in 2020.
