Image via Complex Original
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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.
2.Get your team assembled.
"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.
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4.Crunch the numbers.
"In our database, each team is a different folder, and when you open the folder you have different files. [One] file is all the players, from 1 through 100. So if it's Derek Jeter, he'd be under No. 2. In there, you have jerseys and you have pants that we measure. On a standard pair of pants, you get a waist size and then an in-seam size.
With baseball players, their glutes, their thighs, and their calves are huge. They need all that core for swinging. What we do is we have three sizes on our pants: We have a waist size, we have a pant size, and we have an in-seam. If you're size 32 waist, but you want your pant real baggy, you might buy a size 40 pant. But now the waist is too big. Instead of having a belt holding it up, which is what they did years ago, we physically taper that waist, so it fits your waist right yet the back pant is really loose for you. And then the in-seam is just the regular length of the pant."
5.Customize the fit.
"We basically do any customization a player might need. Now, when you get a pant that's a whole lot bigger than it should be, there's a lot of alterations that need to be made. The rise of the pant is from the bottom of the crotch to the top of the waist. The new trend right now is low-rises. You see a man now in a low-rise pant.
Because this is designed to wear a cup, it's already big. If you're a size 34 standard, the rise is a size 34. But when they put a 40 pant on you, the rise is 40. So we have to adjust the rise of the pant, make it a little bit higher.
Same thing with the bottom [leg] opening. Some of them like to go over the cleat, over the shoe—that's a big trend that they're right now. So we adjust this bottom opening—they get adjustments either bigger or smaller. If any guy wears any protection, say, a knee brace, we adjust it. For any reasons, we'll customize this pant to his liking. This year, we measured about 2000-some players, and we customized about 1,176 pair of pants. We'll go down to the details for these players."
It isn't just about the pants, either. Majestic goes through the same process with their jerseys in order to find the right length for every player, and whether they need a more tapered fit. No one on the field is unaccounted for.
"Every player, every coach," says Panuccio. "The whole nine yards."
6.Find the right fabric.
"The fabric that was used years ago only had a one-way stretch into it. It could only stretch the width of the fabric. What we did is that we engineered a four-way stretch into this. As you notice, most fabrics only stretch a certain way. With this fabric, see the give? It has a lot more range-of-movement for us; it's more performance-oriented than anything else. It's all in the knitting of the fabric.
The fabrics that you see today are actually getting designed more for the hot seasons. They're technical fabrics, they're moisture-resistant. The older, polyester ones got a little bit more on the hot side."
7.Cater to the player.
"There's players I know who wear the same size for 10 years, and there's veteran players who change their size three times a year. It all depends. I had a player who wore 11 different size pants during the year. Every year, he would have a whole bunch of different sizes. It was what felt good on him that day. [Laughs.] He might've ate a little bit too much because he'd have a 34 waist, a 34.5, and a 35.
We will have specific patterns and markers for each player out there. If they're called, if they're traded and have to go to another team, we just bring up the specs, we look at it, we make the garment for another team, and we send it off to them."