Texas Rangers’ new City Connect uniforms bring back red, tie in state’s history

The Texas Rangers will debut their new City Connect uniforms April 24, wearing red jerseys with TEJAS on the front, cream pants and a red block-T cap.

ARLINGTON — The leaked photo of the Texas Rangers’ new City Connect jersey was real, though not necessarily what meets the naked eye. The jerseys do, indeed, read TEJAS across the front, but the color in the photo doesn’t pop as well as the real thing does.

Red is back in the Rangers’ jersey rotation. The cochineal red is not quite the red hue that fans fell in love with from 2009 until a few seasons ago, but it’s not far off and it’s definitely not the maroon that the leaked photo depicted.

The red jerseys will be complemented by cream pants and a red cap with a white block T that harken back to caps from early in the club’s history. As with any City Connect jersey, the details tell a story, in this case, the deep ties between the Lone Star State and Mexico.

“We knew that our players had a lot of love for the red. We’ve heard from our fans, and collectively as a front office, we love the red,” said Travis Dillon, the Rangers’ senior vice president of marketing. “After telling our origin story for the first one, we felt like whatever we did this time through that, that we wanted to prioritize red as the color.

“Then, the story that we decided to tell, we wanted the actual red to not only going back to the red jerseys that we’ve had in the past, but doing it in a way that celebrated such an important piece of Mexican history and Mexican culture, cochineal red.”

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The Rangers will debut their new City Connects on April 24 against the A’s, three days after San Jacinto Day. The Texian army defeated the Mexican army April 21, 1836, in the Battle of San Jacinto to gain independence.

Texas was admitted to the union Dec. 29, 1845.

As was the case with the first go-round of City Connects, the Rangers will wear the new ones for every Friday home game. The uniforms will also be worn in June on Mexican Heritage Night and in September on Hispanic Heritage Night.

The Rangers’ marketing and creative teams dug in on the links to Mexico beyond the red. The word Tejas translates to friendship in Caddo language, and the state shape on the left sleeve is in papel picado as an homage to Mexican folk art.

The piping on the pants and sleeves is a charro-inspired pattern found on the Mariachi de los Texas Rangers uniforms; the rallying cry “Viva Tejas” can be found inside the hats and on the jerseys above the Nike brand patch; and the leather belts represent the tradition of the vaquero, who helped shape the cowboy identity in Mexico and Texas.

“Celebrating that infusion of the cultures was important for us,” Dillon said.

He acknowledged that the new duds are more connected to the state than Arlington and the Metroplex, as the first City Connects were. The Rangers are one of the few teams in baseball that are named after their home state rather than their city, and Dillon said that gave the Rangers some leeway.

“We wanted this to be a Texas story, and we told that story through reimagining some of the elements of some of our previous uniforms in a way that really celebrates that Mexican impact on the culture of Texas,” Dillon said. “The way we look at it is, whether you say it with an X or a J, that it’s the same place and we’re all proud to call it home.”

The Rangers did much of their marketing work with the players during spring training in Arizona and kept a tight lid on the design of the new uniforms. Dillon said that the leaked image March 24 came from the retail side and was not internal.

The players approved of the design.

“We shot with a handful of players, and then we actually showed the entire clubhouse during spring training,” Dillon said. “They all got to see it. The reception that we got was all positive. The guys were excited for the red. The cream pants were a big hit, and a lot of the comments we got were just appreciation for the red and how clean the design was. And then there was, with several guys on the team, an appreciation for the story that we were telling.”

Jeff Wilson, jwilson@alldlls.com