A Step-By-Step Guide to How Major League Baseball Uniforms Are Made

We got fitted by Majestic Athletic, the official apparel company for Major League Baseball.

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Since 2005, the company responsible for outfitting every team in Major League Baseball hasn't been Nike. Adidas? Guess again. Founded in Bangor, Pa. in 1976 (and now headquartered in Easton, Pa.), Majestic Athletic is a small-town company that got called up to the bigs in 2000, when they signed their first uniform deals with the Philadelphia Phillies, the Houston Astros, and the Baltimore Orioles. Since then, their superior craft and attention to detail has earned the praise and business of every team in the league. 

What exactly is it about Majestic's quality that makes them stand out from the competition, though? To learn more about it, we had Michael Panuccio and Joe Fisher, the Patterns Manager and the Brand Coordinator for Majestic, stop by the Complex office and fit our Sports team with some custom unis of our own. While measuring Maurice Peebles, Russ Bengtson and myself, Panuccio gave us a step-by-step guide detailing Majestic's form-fitted approach to uniform customization and tailoring. 

1. Get your team assembled.

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"We have four teams of three. We have a fitter, we have a data-entry person, and we also have a person who does writing, y'know just documents everything in an Excel form. The reason for that is towards the end of the fittings we cross-reference, we make sure everybody heard the same thing. When we go down to spring training, we'll start at about 6 o'clock in the morning, and it takes us anywhere between three and four hours to fit. We'll fit all the roster [players], the non-rosters, the managers—we fit everybody down there. So, we're averaging about 60 and 70 players. 

When we're done, we do the cross-reference. We sit down with the equipment manager. What he does is he says how many he needs for each players—how many home pants, how many road pants, how alternate pants, and then road jerseys, as we go through. 

Most of the time they get two home, two road, and an alternate. But there's some teams that get six or seven pair of pants apiece, depending on the player, and that's what they use for the entire season. The Yankees probably get the most uniforms."

Panuccio also spoke glowingly about Majestic's team in their Easton facility, the women behind the sewing machines who deliver an unmatched level of precision and care to the company's product. 

2.

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3. Crunch the numbers.

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4. Customize the fit.

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5. Find the right fabric.

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6. Cater to the player.

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