About Threads

Threads Of Our Game is a website for the baseball obsessed. It’s a website for those who are fascinated by the little details of the game’s first decades.

There are already many great resources to tell you who won, who lost, and who played—way back when. Now, Threads will tell you what they wore—way back when.

Welcome to Threads Of Our Game, a visual almanac of 19th-century baseball uniforms by Craig Brown. Here you can view renderings of long-forgotten baseball threads. Over 2,500 uniform drawings and over 800 posts have been completed so far, each based on visual documentation and written resources from the period.

We encourage you to send feedback on the drawings you find on these pages. Or better yet, we hope you can contribute research to this project. As you might imagine, there are many uniforms that require better documentation and study. We truly hope you will join us in making this uniform database the single documented resource for baseball historians everywhere. To see other contributors to this site, click here.

We periodically send out emails outlining important updates to the site — something we call the Threads News Feed. If you would like to be included in these updates, please send your email address to the gmail account below. Please note, your email address will not be shared with any outside party. Thanks!

Please contact me at threadsofourgame(at)gmail(dot)com

Threads Media

I was honored at being asked to discuss 19th-century uniforms with award-winning author Rob Neyer on SABRcast with Rob Neyer (episode #244). You can hear the interview here.

Read about recent posts to the site on the Threads News Feed page here.

I recently penned a mini-story about a mysterious player on an old baseball card. Read the story at the SABR Baseball Card blog here.

Threads Of Our Game was launched in the summer of 2014 and over time we have been adding more and more content. The scope of this project is the period 1856-1900. Under ‘Purpose & Scope‘, there is more detail about the teams and leagues we will include in this database. Bookmark this site so you can return to see all of our updates as we go. There is no fee to view the database, however please note that renderings cannot be downloaded, shared, reproduced or copied in any form or media without the expressed written consent of Craig Brown.

19th-Century Baseball
Yes. There was baseball before 1900. In fact, the game was played throughout the 1800s, first as gentlemanly exercise and in many regional variants. In the 1840s, competing clubs in the east published their rules of the game, and by the late 1850s the sport grew into a national obsession. Baseball became a business in the 1860s and the first professional leagues arrived in the 1870s. The late 1880s saw a new growth spurt and crossover into mass appeal, while the 1890s saw labor issues, bullish owners and turbulent financial times. Through it all, the allure of baseball remained.

For the Love of Uniforms
Not many things came before the uniform in baseball. Nine innings came later. The overhand delivery came later. The fielder’s glove came later. The designated hitter came much later. But almost from the beginning, uniforms were there. They link the old game with today’s game, just as they link one generation of fans to the next. In many ways, uniforms are the threads of our game.

Are You Thread-worthy?
This website is for you—the baseball historian, the vintage league player and any fan fascinated by the old game. We are looking for individuals like yourself to supply unique, local knowledge and expertise about a team or region. If you have information to share, please send an email.

Why “Our Game?”
The name of this project is inspired by words attributed to Walt Whitman. In 2014, MLB historian John Thorn relayed in his blog the recorded exchange that brought about this phrase: “In his last years, living in Camden, New Jersey, Whitman had a devoted admirer at his side, Horace Traubel, who invaluably recorded their conversations. Upon reading in the newspaper of April 7, 1889, that Spalding’s world tourists had returned home, Whitman said to Traubel: ‘Did you see the baseball boys are home from their tour around the world? How I’d like to meet them — talk with them, maybe ask them some questions.’ Traubel replied, ‘Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic!’ [Whitman] was hilarious: ‘That’s beautiful, the hurrah game! Well — it’s our game. That’s the chief fact in [our] connection with it.’”

About the Artist
Craig Brown has been attending baseball games since 1969. He is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) and a friend of the Rochester Baseball Historical Society. Craig was recognized by SABR in 2018 for “significant contributions to the knowledge and understanding of historical baseball imagery.” He is a design and marketing professional living in sunny Georgia.

That’s me at an Orioles game, summer 1971. I hope you enjoy your “Threads” visit as much as I enjoyed that super-cool replica batting helmet.

I had a great time at the 2025 SABR Frederick Ivor-Campbell Conference in Cooperstown. Here I am, at left, reading from my presentation notes (instead of engaging with the audience), and at right, absorbing the knowledge of David Block, origins researcher and author of “Baseball Before We Knew It” and “Pastime Lost.”

I was honored to have been selected to speak for the first time at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum in Cooperstown, NY, as part of the 2018 SABR Frederick Ivor-Campbell Conference. It was a blast talking about baseball fashion. Note the rapt attention (ha!).

Conference photos from Richard Tourangeau.