“The new and enterprising Cleveland Club management has taken the bull by the horns and numbered its players,” proclaimed Sporting Life magazine on July 8, 1916. A weekly sports journal based in Philadelphia Sporting Life had recommended that teams adopt numbering “years ago”—a suggestion that baseball team owners had soundly ignored. Now they had been beaten to the punch by a football league. Even before the formation of the National Football League in 1920 (and the addition of complicated rules regarding who could wear which number), spectators at football games in the United States could identify players by the numbers on their uniforms.
The journal continued:
Now that the Cleveland Club has broken the ice, it is only a question of time when all other clubs will fall into line for a system that has everything in its favor and not one sound or even plausible reason against it. But that does not obscure or minimize the fact that but for hidebound conservatism the base ball folks might have been the first to adopt the system instead of tagging along after the foot ball fellows.
“Tagging along after the foot ball fellows,” though, would be the baseball club’s fate for a while longer. As Sporting Life snidely observed, club owners were loathe to change anything about the way they managed their game—especially if that change required them to write a check. But it wasn’t just owners, the baseball players didn’t like being numbered, either.
When the Cleveland Club stopped numbering its uniforms the following year, in 1917, it seemed as if everyone was happy but the fans. Wearing jerseys decorated with only a team’s logo, its players were almost indistinguishable from one another on the field. “And there we leave it to the magnates to mull over for 40 years, or possibly 70 years,” wrote Thomas S. Rice for the Brooklyn Eagle in 1923. “Then, perhaps, they will wake up to the extent that they will sew on the sleeves of the athletes numerals so small that they could not be read halfway across the diamond by a professional sharpshooter, much less by a paying spectator back in the stands.”
Luckily for baseball spectators, Rice’s prediction of a 40- or 70-year wait was a little off the mark. The St. Louis Cardinals made a short-lived attempt to introduce numbered jerseys that same year, a move the players allegedly hated so much that it negatively impacted their performance. Though the Cardinals’ exact objections are unclear, team manager Branch Rickey allegedly suggested that being easily identified on the field subjected players to increased criticism from opposing players or heckling from fans. It wasn’t until 1929 that the practice finally stuck—and though the New York Yankees are widely credited with being the first Major League Baseball team to permanently adopt the practice of numbering uniforms, their opening home game, planned for April 16, 1929, was rained out. Under the clear skies on the same day, several states away, the Cleveland Indians played in numbered jerseys that would be adopted, permanently, for the first time. When the Yankees began their delayed season on April 18, they followed suit.
After the Indians and the Yankees proved that these new uniforms were no longer a passing fad, other major league teams began following suit. Originally, the process for numbering players was simple and spectator-oriented: as reported by the Toronto Globe in 1929, players were “numbered by their position in batting order…[so] a fan who does not know his Yankees can search the field until he finds a player with a huge No. 3 on his back.”
Numbering wasn’t just an American trend. On August 25, 1928, Arsenal and Chelsea became the first English Football League clubs to wear numbered jerseys in matches. After a little more experimenting, the league made numbering mandatory in 1939. (Other sports worked on their own timelines: rugby players had been numbering themselves in Australia and New Zealand since 1897, but cricketers didn’t come around to numbered jerseys until the 1990s.)
Today the ways players are assigned their numbers across professional sports leagues have changed; assignments take into account the number’s history, the player’s position, league-specific traditions, and more. But the reason why athletes wear numbered jerseys at all remains the same: so that their fans can identify them on the field.