About Threads

Threads Of Our Game is a website for the baseball obsessed. It’s a website for those who are fascinated by the little details of the game’s first decades.

There are already many great resources to tell you who won, who lost, and who played—way back when. Now, Threads will tell you what they wore—way back when.

Welcome to Threads Of Our Game, a visual almanac of 19th-century baseball uniforms by Craig Brown. Here you can view renderings of long-forgotten baseball threads. Over 300 uniform drawings have been completed so far, each based on visual documentation and written resources from the period.

We encourage you to send feedback on the drawings you find on these pages. Or better yet, we hope you can contribute research to this project. As you might imagine, there are many uniforms that require better documentation and study. We truly hope you will join us in making this uniform database the single documented resource for baseball historians everywhere. To see other contributors to this site, click here.

We periodically send out emails outlining important updates to the site — something we call the Threads News Feed. If you would like to be included in these updates, please send your email address to the gmail account below. Please note, your email address will not be shared with any outside party. Thanks!

Please contact me at threadsofourgame(at)gmail(dot)com

Threads Media

I was honored at being asked to discuss 19th-century uniforms with award-winning author Rob Neyer on SABRcast with Rob Neyer (episode #244). You can hear the interview here.

We’re just warming up
Threads Of Our Game was launched in the summer of 2014 and over time we have been adding more and more content. The scope of this project is the period 1856-1900. Under ‘Purpose & Scope‘, there is more detail about the teams and leagues we will include in this database. Bookmark this site so you can return to see all of our updates as we go. There is no fee to view the database.

19th-Century Baseball
Yes. There was baseball before 1900. In fact, there was six decades of it. What began as gentlemanly exercise in the 1840s grew into a national obsession in the 1850s. The game became a business in the 1860s and the first leagues arrived in the 1870s. The late 1880s saw a growth spurt and a crossover into mass appeal, while the 1890s saw labor issues, bullish owners and turbulent times. Through it all, the allure of baseball remained.

For the Love of Uniforms
Not many things came before the uniform in baseball. Nine innings came later. The overhand delivery came later. The fielder’s glove came later. The designated hitter came much later. But almost from the beginning, uniforms were there. They link the old game with today’s game, just as they link one generation of fans to the next. In many ways, uniforms are the threads of our game.

Are You Thread-worthy?
This website is for you—the baseball historian, the vintage league player and any fan fascinated by the old game. We are looking for individuals like yourself to supply unique, local knowledge and expertise about a team or region.

Do you…
—-have information that can make a uniform rendering more accurate?
—-have a high-quality picture that shows uniform detail?
—-know about a uniform not shown?
—-see an error in this database?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then Threads needs you!

Diggers Wanted
If you send us information we can use, you will be credited as a “digger” in association with that particular uniform. Our hope is that we will discover several baseball historians in each city who are committed to our cause and who can send us new discoveries or volunteer research time. There’s a lot of information buried out there—we just need to dig.

We’re also looking for historians with other interests, too, such as 19th-century fashion, garment manufacturing and period typography. We want this database to be as accurate as possible and this can only be accomplished with some heavy hitters, so batter up!

About the Artist
Craig Brown has been attending baseball games since 1969. He is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and a friend of the Rochester Baseball Historical Society. Craig was recognized by SABR in 2018 for “significant contributions to the knowledge and understanding of historical baseball imagery.” He is a design and marketing professional living in sunny Georgia.

That’s me at an Orioles game, summer 1971.
I hope you enjoy your ‘Threads’ visit as much as I enjoyed that super-cool replica batting helmet. –CB

That’s me again (much later). I was honored to have been selected to speak at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum in Cooperstown, NY, as part of the 2018 SABR Frederick Ivor-Campbell Conference. It was a blast talking about baseball fashion. Note the rapt attention (ha!).

Photo by Richard Tourangeau.