Diamondbacks Uniform Tracker: April

A feature that debuted last year returns! The last Friday of every month will be our update of the Diamondbacks Uniform Tracker. Since the new sets of uniforms were unveiled in the winter of 2015, and since there were many possible combinations of them, I thought it would be fun to track the Win/Loss records of the various combinations. What sounds like a mildly obsessive thing is really just updating an excel file after every game, which takes like 30 seconds, most of which is the file loading.

The analysis of it? That’s the obsessive part. MLB teams need to use every source of data they can to draw out even the most marginal improvement from the players on the field, and uniform combinations are definitely that. As the Diamondbacks currently are playing well, this is doubly important should they get down to the wire in a pennant race later in the season. The margin between winning the division, being a wild card, or staying home in October could come down to hat selection.

A few notes before we get started:

• The table will be set up by “Home Away/Uniform Type/Hat” “Snake” in uniform type refers to the standard snakeskin gradient of the Home/Away jerseys, “Teal” is the teal outline, etc.
• The Diamondbacks have yet to, and they probably haven’t because they read my column last year, wear Red Hats in a game this season. Red hats only occurred one win last year, and that was the last game of the season. This is science
• The Diamondbacks have started to wear the snake logo hat, but only in conjunction with the Red Tops (and vice-versa), I’ve noticed, which is good, because that means I didn’t have to make another column in the spreadsheet, and who can think of anything worse?
• I don’t really make any distinction between the black hats used in the snake gradient set and the black hats worn in the teal set, because those are set exclusive hats, so they’re just both labeled as “black”. Don’t @ me.

(If you’re curious, here are the final results of the tracker last year)

Not a lot of sample size to really go off of anything here, but a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step and all that.

The biggest thing that jumps out to me is that the Teal Outline set, Home and Away, has the best record by far, and maybe shifting towards that more often may yield dividends down the road. It’s also, in my opinion, the best looking set of all of the new uniforms (on the curve we have to grade them on, let’s be fair), so there may be something to that.

Join us at the end of May for another update, and by then we’ll also have introduced the variable of the MLB Holiday Uniform sets. Should be fun. Or not.