Ohio State infielder graduate Marcus Ernst shows off baseball’s new cream, old-school uniforms. Credit: Ohio State Athletics.

As the 2023 Ohio State baseball season approached, players frequently visited Associate Director of Equipment Services John Dunn’s office to figure out what their new uniform would look like.

Dunn said he was intent on keeping the new look a secret, only revealing the jersey was cream-colored with scarlet accents and a unique logo.

“The logo was the big surprise,” Dunn said. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, it’s a logo you’ve never seen before —there’s probably a zero percent chance that you’ll find it on the internet. ’”

Such buzz around the new jersey and logo is likely due to its uniqueness. Although the cream uniform breaks the norm at Ohio State, straying from the typical rotation of scarlet, gray, white and black, it doesn’t break tradition.

The Buckeyes’ cream jersey is a throwback to the 1906 Ohio State baseball team, featuring scarlet lettering and piping, an all-scarlet Ohio State logo on the left sleeve and an overlapping “OSU” logo on the left chest. Dunn said Ohio State was happy to pay homage to the former team.

“We’re very rigid on what logos we allow on uniforms at Ohio State,” Dunn said. “We brainstormed that a little bit, sent it to our branding committee, but we really weren’t sure what they were going to say. But given the fact that an actual Ohio State team wore it, and it’s a throwback to that time, they were all about it. Any time we can actually reuse a logo from the past and sort of honor the past, they’re all for it.”

The new uniform arrived as part of a new era of Ohio State baseball. Bill Mosiello took over as the Buckeyes’ head coach June 16, 2022, and he said the cream uniform was his idea.

“I love uniforms, but I like them very plain and very simple,” Mosiello said. “I’m not into flashiness, I’m not into wearing 100 different uniforms. That’s why I went with those — I wanted an old-school logo.”

Once Mosiello proposed the idea of a cream uniform in an offseason meeting, Dunn and his colleagues got to work brainstorming old-school ideas. Assistant Director of Football Equipment Services, Kevin Nerl, played a pivotal role in turning Mosiello’s vision into a reality.

While searching through archives, Dunn said Nerl found a photo of the 1906 Ohio State baseball team featuring the chest logo that would eventually find its way onto the Buckeyes’ throwback jersey. While many of Ohio State’s previous uniforms honor notably successful teams from the past — like the Buckeyes’ gray-sleeved 1968 football throwbacks or their all-gray men’s basketball throwbacks — these baseball jerseys are less about past achievements. Instead, the team’s main objective was an “old-school” look, and the 1906 photo was the oldest one the team’s staff could find.

The cream uniform was first worn in a 12-8 win against Dayton March 19, and has been worn every Sunday home game since. Mosiello said he enjoys having a routine uniform for each game in a given week.

“I always knew that when I got my own program, we’d have a Sunday uniform and try to find a certain insignia,” Mosiello said. “It was a little different, which I thought was good.”

In addition to having a fresh and exciting look, Dunn said a Sunday uniform offers a practical advantage. 

“At a school like Ohio State where you have better resources, it’s nice to have more uniforms, so you’re not just flipping the same ones every game or every other game,” Dunn said. “It helps them last longer because they don’t get beat up as often. 

After the Buckeye baseball team rolled out a unique look inspired by Ohio State’s past, Dunn is interested to see if others will try to follow suit.

“I’m kind of curious how many other teams, as they design new uniforms, will try to go into the archives and find a logo that’s sort of been forgotten — lost to history — and dig something up to do something unique,” Dunn said.