Astros’ rainbow jerseys return as a fan favorite

HOUSTON — Once mocked, now fashionable, those rainbow jerseys of the Houston Astros are back in full bloom at the World Series.

They’ve become a fan favorite decades after they de- buted, and Minute Maid Park undoubtedly will be peppered with the out-of-the-box style during the World Series.

Count model Kate Upton in that crowd. She liked the bright colors so much, she recently wore them on the field while celebrating with her fiance, Astros ace Justin Verlander.

No surprise, in fact. The man who designed them said the team was looking to play to a certain demographic.

“We were trying to appeal to women,” recalled Jack Amuny, who turns 80 next month.

The revolutionary pattern was introduced in 1975 and the Astros wore a version with only minor tweaks until 1986. From the start, it caught the eyes of the baseball world: The pullover jersey featured various hues of red, orange and yellow stripes, plus a navy blue star to the left of center.

They didn’t have an official name — while rainbows seem to be the most popular way to describe them, they’re also referred to as tequila sunrise because of the cocktail that features a similar color scheme.

Nolan Ryan pitched his fifth no-hitter in them, and Mike Scott and Larry Dierker also threw no-nos in the gear.

Though they haven’t been the team’s uniforms for more than 20 years, they’re Houston’s go-to throwback. The Astros have worn them 10 times since 1999, including on June 24 when Lance McCullers came off the disabled list and pitched.

“That’s an iconic jersey for us, for the Astros organization,” McCullers said Thursday. “Nolan, Scott, a lot of guys when you think of Astros baseball, you think of those guys, and that jersey.”

There certainly weren’t always such warm feelings about them. When they were released, some called the outfits the ugliest uniforms in the history of baseball.

Amuny, the freelance graphic designer who created the design for ad agency McCann Erickson, didn’t exactly brag about his role in their inception.

“I got a lot of criticism about it and there was a lot of snickering,” he said.

Amuny, who lives in suburban Houston, didn’t receive much guidance when he began the project.

“My assignment was to design something different and I had no restrictions,” he said.

Since this was the early 1970s, all the work was done by hand, with Amuny cutting strips of paper and lining them up in a sequence of hues from light to dark.

“I’m a very conservative person and I was doing something that was really wacko in that no other major league team had a uniform where the top was a different color than the bottom,” he said. “So I think that was a little off. I was just trying to do something that was bright.”

He also said the team hoped to attract more female fans with the uniform redesign.

“The Astros I don’t think at that time had a real good team and they were trying to fill that dome,” Amuny said of the almost 68,000-seat Astrodome.

The only change the Astros made to Amuny’s original design was moving the star from the center of the stripes.

And for the record, Amuny didn’t get rich off the celebrated style.

“Back then I was charging about $50 an hour, so it couldn’t have been a whole lot of money,” he said with a chuckle.

Not that he feels badly about that.