Once you notice it, you’ll see it every time. If you’ve read Paul Lukas for the last 25 years, you get the feeling. If you know Paul Lukas, you understand it even better. And if you are Paul Lukas, it’s a way of life.
What is it? Anything quirky in the visual panorama of sports. The pencil-thin chalk lines in the batter’s box at Dodger Stadium. The upside-down apostrophe on the Baltimore Orioles’ “O’s” logo. The full name on the back of J.D. Martinez’s jersey. The details matter.
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“See how the first and third base cutouts are not rounded?” Lukas asked recently, at Citi Field during a game between the Mets and Cubs. “That’s because they play soccer here, and they put sod over the whole infield. It’s easier to replace the sod in straight-line strips instead of curves, so they don’t have to match it to a curved area there.”
He pauses.
“I hate it,” Lukas said. “Give us a curve. I like the classic curvature.”
His perch at this game – behind first base, in the front row of the middle deck – is its own kind of hidden gem. The seats below cost more, but unless you’re in the front row, there’s always someone in front of you. Give Lukas a higher angle with an unobstructed view, like Statler and Waldorf on “The Muppet Show”.
You might think that Lukas, who is 60, would be a similarly cantankerous critic. But he’s curious, not cranky, and that’s why he’s marking his milestone birthday by leaving the cottage industry he created. The world’s foremost authority on sporting style is retiring from Uni Watch on May 26, the 25th anniversary of its first appearance as a feature in the Village Voice.
Lukas (right) with Jimmy Lonetti, founder of D&J Glove Repair (left) at a Uni Watch 25th anniversary event in Minneapolis earlier this week. (Photo: Paul Lukas)
His website will continue – the weekend editor, Phil Hecken, takes over – but Lukas will be gone, like the numbers on the Phillies’ sleeves or the rounded-edge D on the Tigers’ home jerseys. He reached the conclusion a few years ago.
“I had said most of what I needed to say about uniforms and I wasn’t learning as much from the beat anymore,” Lukas explained. “Uni Watch used to teach me a lot, not just about uniforms, but about design, about marketing. There was a sense of discovery. And that still happens occasionally, but not as often as it used to. I don’t feel like I’m growing, and I don’t want to be through growing.”
Lukas wears a 1973 varsity letterman’s jacket to the Mets game, forest green with gold trim. The fuzzy basketball sewn onto the left side says Harding High, with “Greg” stitched on the other side. Lukas does not know Greg, and he didn’t go to Harding High, wherever it is. He found the jacket on eBay. It fits great and matches the Uni Watch color scheme.
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Lukas grew up in Blue Point, Long Island, rooting for the Mets – and, as another Long Island-bred Mets fan, Jerry Seinfeld, might say, especially rooting for their laundry. As a Little Leaguer, he was most excited about wearing stirrups, his favorite uniform element in any sport. In the classroom, he would doodle team logos in the margins of his notebooks.
“And sometimes I would also draw – and I could do it now – just a leg, to get the stirrups just right,” Lukas said. “I don’t know, there was something pleasing about it. It’s how baseball is supposed to look, to me.”
It’s not how baseball looks anymore. Most players wear their pants down to their shoe tops, and those who show socks almost never wear stirrups. Minnesota Twins pitcher Chris Paddack is a happy exception – “MLB’s preeminent hosiery hero,” Lukas calls him – and he spoke with Lukas for a stirrup-centric Q&A in 2022.
“I’m kind of an older-school guy,” Paddack told Uni Watch, “and I do like to look the part.”
Lukas is drawn to the classically kitschy. After college at SUNY-Binghamton, he worked as a book editor for nine years, publishing an indie-rock zine for a while and then another exploring the details of consumer culture. That led to a book in 1997 – “Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure” – and a career as a freelance writer.
The Uni Watch column became Lukas’ most steady gig. The daily blog began in 2006, with longer, spin-off pieces appearing on ESPN’s website for a dozen more years.
Lukas was a faithful sleuth of things that make you go hmmm in sports. Which athletes wear their wedding band on the field? What’s it like to move the chains at an NFL game? Which meats would prevail in a March Madness bracket for carnivores? (The final four: standing rib roast, bratwurst, bacon and chicken tails).
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“He has this incredible eye for detail, and he’s insatiably curious,” said Ken Davidoff, a former New York Post baseball columnist and a friend of Lukas’ for years. “Like the twist tie for a loaf of bread versus whatever you call the other thing – you know, the thing with the little hole? He did a whole article on that. Who does that, you know? But nothing is too mundane for him.”
Lukas – who once had 38 vintage pencil sharpeners affixed to a door frame in his apartment – has a tattoo on his arm of the Brannock Device, the foot-measuring tool you’ll find in every shoe store. It was manufactured for years in Syracuse, N.Y., and Lukas pushed for the Triple-A team there to change its name for a night to the Devices.
I'm going to be throwing out the first pitch at the @SyracuseChiefs' Brannock Device Night on May 31, so today I got my 15-year-old Brannock Device tattoo re-inked so it'll look sharp for the event. Looks much better! Old version on left, new on right. pic.twitter.com/MuE2vK6OY7
— Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) May 7, 2018
When it happened, in 2018, Lukas tossed the ceremonial first pitch.
“The Brannock Device is sort of my North Star, because everybody knows what it is,” he said. “There’s literally no one in this stadium whose foot has not been in one, but almost nobody knows what it’s called. So it’s simultaneously ubiquitous and anonymous. And that to me is a very powerful, interesting combination.”
Here’s another powerful, interesting combination: sports fandom and brand loyalty. It’s the foundation, in a way, of Lukas’ beat.
“Usually when we talk about brand loyalty, we’re really talking about product loyalty,” Lukas explains. “Like, I like Cheerios. And that means I like the yellow box. It pushes a certain button in my brain when I see it. It looks familiar. Some little part of me inside smiles. But what I really like is the way Cheerios taste. And if they change the product, like, if it didn’t taste the same, or if it got soggy in milk, then my familiarity with the yellow box only goes so far.
“And this is what co*ke learned with New co*ke: that if you change the product, brand loyalty is not enough. But in sports, the quality of the product is changing all the time. Your team can be good one year and bad the next year. Players get hurt, get traded, they retire, they cycle in and out. But you are still loyal to that logo and those colors and that uniform.
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“It’s a really irrational, nonsensical form of brand loyalty. I don’t think there’s really anything like it – except maybe patriotism and religion – where it really defies our standard notions of why we’re loyal to something. That’s the power of the uniform. And I think that’s why people are so nuts about uniforms.”
That’s also why the Arizona Diamondbacks should have known better than to give Lukas an exclusive first look at their redesign for the 2016 season. To Lukas, the team should have never abandoned its original purple palette, anyway. But this version was a fashion fiasco: a charcoal-gray road uniform, a pants stripe that stopped mid-thigh, a red splotch above the heel that made it look like players were bleeding. Lukas didn’t hold back.
“He just crushed them,” Davidoff said. “He was like, ‘If they read me at all, they should have known that I would hate these.’”
Lukas’ favorite uniforms lean traditional: the Lou Brock-era St. Louis Cardinals, the Bart Starr-era Green Bay Packers, the Nate Thurmond-era San Francisco Warriors (“The City” on front, cable car on back). But he makes a distinction between a traditionalist and the classicist that he is.
“A traditionalist says, ‘Don’t ever change anything because change is bad,’” Lukas said. “A classicist says, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but if it is broke, absolutely fix it, improve it.’ And that’s, to me, what I see a little too much of in the uni-verse right now.”
That is, a whole lot of change for change’s sake, bringing an odd sort of symmetry to Lukas’ quarter-century on his beat. In 1999, said Todd Radom, a longtime designer and sports-branding expert, we were coming to the end of an “over-design” era in sports – periwinkle accents for the Angels, teal jerseys for the Detroit Pistons, a “Fish Sticks” mascot for the New York Islanders, and so on.
Now, after a period of relative calm, it’s another crowded, confusing visual landscape. Uniforms are hardly uniform anymore.
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“It’s the Oregon Duck-ization, if you want to look at it that way, of sports writ large,” Radom said. “This kind of tracks our collective attention spans. People want more variety, and things come and go at such a rapid pace.”
It’s not all zany, of course. Some baseball rebrands have been elegant, Lukas said: the Blue Jays and Padres, after years in the stylistic wilderness, have settled into sharp updates of their classic designs. The Mets – for all of their forays into black – have never fundamentally changed their original logo from 1962.
His favorite team got that right, but they’re not the best stewards of their own brand legacy. They don’t know who created Mr. Met, for example, and Lukas doesn’t either, despite an exhaustive effort.
“I’ve come close, tantalizingly close,” he said. “I’ve got the breadcrumbs. There was a period where I was completely obsessed with it, talking to artists, their children and their grandchildren, looking in old notebooks for a proto-version of it.”
That pursuit will be left to someone else now, assuming anyone cares as much as Lukas. That’s a big assumption, though the outcry this spring over Nike’s new MLB uniforms showed that fans hold very strong opinions about how their teams look.
Lukas does, too, and he’s been invigorated by the MLB story – but not enough to change his plans. For 25 years, he’s shown the world of sports style to be broader than anyone knew. But there’s a lot more out there for him, like the foul lines of a baseball diamond, extending into the infinite beyond.
“It’s right there, but nobody’s thinking about it,” Lukas says, his gaze turning again to those rigid cutouts around first and third base at Citi Field. “And if they did think about it, they’re like, ‘Huh, OK.’ But I try to find out.
“Basically the world is still an interesting place to me – thankfully, I’m 60 years old. And I think as long as that’s the case, I’ll always have things to write about.”
(Top photo credits l-r clockwise: Patrick Smith/Getty Images, Mary Bakjia, Patrick Smith/Getty Images, Paul Lukas, Nick Cammett/Diamond Images via Getty Images, Elsa/Getty Images)
