I haven't written one of these "team colors" posts for a little while, so how about if I slap one on here while I'm still recuperating from ... well, just about everything?
The Tigers' team colors interest me because both of their primary colors are up for debate. Officially, I believe, their team colors are navy and orange, as you see displayed on the 1974 Topps Al Kaline card here.
But the "navy" part always threw me off. Much like the Yankees, which also lists its primary team color as "navy," I don't read the color as navy. I read it as black. All during my time growing up, I thought the Tigers wore black caps and white uniforms with black piping.
Stuff like this didn't help:
In 1981, Topps used caps of each respective team on its cards. It attempted to replicate the color of the cap, too. But that cap there is definitely not navy. It is black.
It's not until you get right up close to a Tigers player that you realize, "hey, that's blue he's wearing there."
As for the "orange" part of the Tigers' team colors, sometimes I see it as red, and I bet a few other fans do, too. It wasn't even until the early 1970s that the orange color appeared in Tigers uniforms. Detroit starting using it on its road uniforms. But sometimes that "D" in the road cap logo looks red to me.
As for the colors Topps used for Tigers cards through the years, it eventually came around to using navy/blue and orange, but it took awhile. Topps leaned on yellow in the early years. There was a period in the mid-to-late 1970s when Topps went with brown and yellow. This was when Topps used the same two colors with two teams. Topps used brown and yellow for both the Tigers and the Padres, who knows why. But thanks to that move, all the world was in harmony when those two teams met in the 1984 World Series.
So here's the list on what colors Topps used for the Tigers during years in which it dedicated colors based on which team was displayed:
1964: red and yellow
1965: red and blue
1966: yellow and red
1967: pink
1968: yellow and red
1969: yellow and red
1971: yellow and red
1972: gold and yellow
1974: orange and blue
1976: brown and yellow
1977: brown, yellow and red
1978: brown and orange
1979: yellow, brown and red
1980: brown, yellow and red
1981: pink, yellow and black
1982: blue and purple
1983: orange and purple
1984: blue and gold
1985: blue and orange
1986: blue
1987: blue
1988: gold and green
1989: blue and orange
1991: orange, blue and gray
1992: orange, red, blue and yellow
1993: orange and blue
1994: blue, orange and yellow
1998: blue
2000: blue
2002: orange and blue
2003: orange
2004: blue and orange
2005: blue and orange
2006: blue and orange
2007: blue and orange
2008: orange and blue
2009: blue
2010: orange
Tigers' team colors: navy/blue and orange
What Topps says are the Tigers' team colors: blue and orange!
Yeah, I guess those caps aren't black after all.
(The tally: Blue-21, Orange-17, Yellow-12, Red-9, Brown-5, Gold-3, Pink-2, Purple-2, Black-1, Gray-1, Green-1)
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