Houston Astros and Texas Rangers Jerseys Will Both Look Different in 2025

The business side of sports operates like a steamroller in a lot of ways. American sports are a huge moneymaking operation. We're talking billions of dollars. But sometimes the decisions made on the business side cause so much issue with the actual sport, changes are made. The Houston Astros and Texas Rangers will both be experiencing that during this MLB season.

A business decision was made by MLB leadership to give jersey creation and sales rights to Nike and Fanatics. This meant that duo would have control over what the jerseys were made of, how much fabric was used, and ultimately...how cheaply they could do it. Because remember, this is the business side, where profits are #1, and the product isn't even #2.

So Nike and Fanatics started producing some of the worst quality jerseys we've seen in major American sports since college football uniforms were getting torn off running backs every other play. These MLB jerseys were no longer made of a high quality material, something pervious jersey maker Majestic prided themselves on; heavyweight material and quality patches.

The new Fanatics jerseys featured a material that would look like wet paper as soon as a player started sweating. These jerseys would also tear at the first sign of friction. Leading to players ripping their pants during slides.

They also cut corners on the patches for the jerseys. Logos shrunk, and nameplates were reduced in size. Players names on the backs of the jerseys look like they shrank by about 50%, with the numbers shrinking too. They can try to pass that off as a "clever design" or "new fashion"...but it's just a cost saving move, which wasn't passed on to the consumer. Jerseys are more expensive than ever.

There was a huge issue during the season about color matching as well. It appeared that the new jerseys were constantly being sourced from the cheapest available place, which started to create a problem when trying to match shades of colors.

Teams would try to pair their road grey jerseys and pants, only to find out all of the pants were a slightly darker shade of grey than the jerseys. Or in some cases, half of their pants were darker, and the rest were correct. So the team was a total mismatch on the field.

For some teams, they solved this by going with a colored top and grey pants, to hide the mismatches. The Houston Astros wore their orange tops with grey pants a lot in 2024, which might have been a plan before these problems came to light, but it seems like there might have been more to it.

Either way, the good news is that changes are being put into place to fix this. MLB has announced that the materials for the jerseys are going to revert back to the pre-Fanatics era material. But that's just one of the fixes.

This year's MLB jerseys will go back to the old lettering too. Something we have already seen.

The letters are big, material is fixed, and MLB says other changes to bring a close to last year's jersey nightmare have already been rolled out. So teams like the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros will both look different on the field this year. But it should be different compared to last season, and should be something that we're more used to seeing in previous years.