Mariners to debut new Steelheads jerseys for Sunday Night Baseball

Tonight’s Mariners game won’t be just their Sunday Night Baseball debut; the team will also debut their new Steelheads uniforms, created to honor the short-lived Negro Leagues team located in Seattle. The Mariners are the first MLB team to feature a historic Negro Leagues uniform as part of the club’s standard uniform rotation. The black and cream Steelheads jerseys will be worn on home Sunday games, replacing the royal blue, yellow and cream Sunday alternates that the team has worn for the past decade.

The Steelheads were part of the West Coast Negro Baseball Association, founded by Olympian Jesse Owens and Abe Saperstein (owner of the Harlem Globetrotters). Owens formed the Portland Rosebuds in Oregon, while Saperstein moved his barnstorming team the Cincinnati Crescents to Seattle and renamed them the Steelheads. The Steelheads played for just part of one year, 1946, playing their home games at Seattle’s Sick’s Stadium, where the Tacoma Rainiers played from 1938-1976.

The Steelheads would play at Sick’s when the Rainiers were on the road. Very little information exists about the Steelheads today, and what we do know is largely due to the efforts of local historian David Eskenazi . Kevin Martinez, Mariners President of Business Operations, said the Steelheads uniforms were reconstructed using one of the two available pictures of a player in a Steelheads uniform.

(The second picture shows a catcher, making it impossible to make out uniform details. ) The first time the Mariners wore the Steelheads jerseys, in a game against Kansas City in 1995 where the Royals wore the historic Monarchs jerseys, the jerseys were based on concepts rather than historical fact. Eskenazi devoted himself to finding photographs so the uniforms could be based in reality.