When the Red Sox were developing their new Fenway Green City Connect uniforms, club officials had high hopes that the design would resonate. But when you’re talking about a radical new look for one of baseball’s most storied franchises, there is always some level of risk.
As it turned out, the greens proved to be a home run.
Since their debut in May the Fenway Greens have been a massive success. The new uniforms became the club’s signature Friday night look and were worn during several of the club’s biggest wins of this past season.
Troup Parkinson, the Red Sox’s chief marketing and partnerships officer, also said the greens are already the highest selling City Connect in MLB history, outselling others that have been on the market for as many as four years, including the club’s previous Boston Marathon yellows.
“It has sold the most of all City Connects to date, and it’s only been out since May,” Parkinson said.
Originally conceived as far back as 2023, the uniforms are the same shade of green as Fenway Park and incorporate numerous nods to the Green Monster and the ballpark as a whole. When news that a new alternate uniform was in the works broke last fall, speculation ran high throughout the offseason over what the jersey would ultimately look like.
Once the uniform officially debuted on May 16, it was met with widespread acclaim.
“It was amazing hearing the fan reaction because that’s when you know you’ve hit on something that people like as much as you do,” Parkinson said. “We all internally loved it but it’s hard to be our own focus group.”
Much like the original yellow City Connects, which were inspired by the Boston Marathon, the greens took on a life of their own thanks in part to how well the club played while wearing them. Though the Red Sox went 6-5 overall in green, all six of those wins came in walk-off fashion, including the club’s playoff-clinching victory on Sept. 26.
Parkinson said it was gratifying to see how quickly the players and coaches embraced the new uniform, though he acknowledged there was some trepidation about what might happen if the club hadn’t played well.
“It’s like oh shoot, if we don’t win in them will players and fans sour on them?” Parkinson said. “It was awesome that we kind of got lucky and were winning all those games in walk-off fashion, they seemed to be the perfect look for Friday night at Fenway, which generally is such an energy-laced game regardless.”
While Parkinson said the Fenway Greens weren’t designed with money front of mind — revenue from jersey sales and merchandise is mostly pooled and shared by all 30 MLB clubs — the uniform’s financial success speaks to how well received it was among the fanbase.
“The sales were strong, which is validation that people liked it,” Parkinson said. “The fact that it’s the highest selling City Connect uniform to date in all of Major League Baseball when you’ve now had four years of City Connects and some teams like us have already gone through their second iteration, that’s pretty cool.”
Yellows to return
Typically when MLB teams have introduced a new City Connect uniform they’ve retired the one that preceded it. When the Red Sox launched their greens, they took the unusual step of keeping their old yellows and using it as part of their core uniform rotation.
Parkinson said the yellows will return again in 2026 and that there are no plans to get rid of it anytime soon.
“We love the yellows so much we put that into our kit,” Parkinson said. “When you do something that seems to fit and make sense, you almost can’t imagine it not existing.
“So for me anyway, now it feels like if we didn’t have the yellow it’s like ‘no we always do the yellow and this is when we do it,’ and the greens now, now I’m like ‘how could we ever go away from the greens?'” he continued. “They’re not schtick, it’s not ‘hey we have to do a City Connect, let’s just do one that’s about something with the history of Boston,’ this means more. So I think that’s why you don’t see us jumping to replace with something else.”
Broadly speaking, Parkinson said there are no plans to change up the club’s uniforms next year or in the near future.
“You’ll see the same rollout of uniforms for us,” Parkinson said. “We’ve got the red alternate, you’ve got the home whites, you’ve got the grays, you’ve got the Boston-specific Patriots Day one-off jersey we wear, you have the yellows and you have the greens.”
No big projects coming
In addition to the new City Connect uniform, this past year saw a number of other major marketing initiatives come to fruition for the Red Sox, including a pair of Netflix documentaries.
This offseason should be much quieter on that front, as Parkinson said the club doesn’t expect to announce any new projects of that magnitude in the next few months.
“This (winter) will be quiet by comparison, but hopefully fans are as excited as we are with the offseason because it was obviously a super fun run with this team,” Parkinson said.
