1899 Toledo (Toledos)

Left: This rendering is based on visual documentation for uniform style and written documentation for color. Minor details may be undocumented or difficult to determine. An educated guess is made to complete the rendering.

Rendering accuracy: Year: documented    Team: documented

Right: This rendering is based on written documentation for uniform style and color. No visual documentation is known and an artist’s conceptualization is used to create the rendering.

Rendering accuracy: Year: documented    Team: documented

Visual documentation on these uniforms:

Photo A

Dated 1899. Year of photo confirmed by the appearance of players Ferguson, Myers and McDonough in combination with players Butler, Wiltse and Griffin. These men only played on the same roster for Toledo in 1899. Players wore a white uniform in this photo with a dark belt and stockings. The cap had a dark brim and two dark horizontal bands against a white body. The shirt displayed a large letter “T” in an old-English font. A newspaper report from early 1899 described the Toledo home uniform as “white with navy blue trimmings.”

Top row, from left: C Ferguson (96-99), E Cates (98-00), B Smith (96-00, 03), E Beck (96-00) and E Arthur (96-00). Middle: I Butler (99, 00), B Ewing (97-00), B Gilks (97-02), S Wiltse (99-00) and B Myers (97-99). Front: S Griffin (99, 00), W Hartman (96-00) and J McDonough (97-99). Image and player IDs from Ralph Elliott LinWeber, The Toledo Baseball Guide of the Mud Hens (1944). Years with team from baseball-reference.com.

Written documentation on these uniforms:
April 1899: “The Toledo Commercial says: ‘The new [Toledo] uniforms will be of white, with navy blue trimmings for all home games, and while the boys are laying low their enemies on foreign fields of battle blue uniforms with red trimmings will grace their manly forms.’” From the Dayton (OH) Herald, April 13, 1899. Research from Peter Reitan.

Team genealogy: Coming soon