Which Arms Are His?

     Thirteen more team year pages are in, as 1961 through 1973 have been added to the database. Hopefully I can crank the rest of these out today, and we can turn our attention towards the 2010 team pages. You'll notice we have combined the large view of the team image and the team schedule all on one page. By the time we launch, all 2010 team pages will be in, and if you click on a 2010 team (from either the team's page or the 2010 page) you'll get a page like this, with the full team image and the week-to-week scores and matchups of that year's team. For years previous to 2010, when we first launch the website, clicking on a team's thumbnail will just go directly to the image, as it does now.  But after we roll out additional years of team pages, beginning with 2009, and then 2008, and so on, all teams will have pages like this.  These pages will be a little more time-consuming to create, so bear with us and keep following this blog to see when features get added to the website.
     When a team's yearly pages is complete, which will look something like this to the left, you find at the bottom, if you scroll down, the team's weekly head-to-head matchups.  Part of the purpose of this blog is to demonstrate features of this website.  To give a preview of this page and how it will operate when it is fully functional, take a look at the example below of Weeks 1 and 2 of the Green Bay Packers' 2010 season.

     When on this page, if you click on the 'Week 1' or 'Week 2', you will go to a page featuring all the matchups of that week's NFL action.  If you click on the 'Philadelphia' or the 'Buffalo' you will go to that team's 2010 page.  And if you click on the 'W, 27-20' or the 'W, 34-7' you will be taken to the pro-football-reference.com box score of that game. And of course, clicking on the thumbnail image of the team matchup will give you a high resolution view of that matchup image.
    And now a feature of the website that will be rolled out gradually this fall as it coincides with (hopefully) the opening of the 2011 NFL season, if you click on the 'at' or the 'vs', you will be taken to a page which will show all of the head-to-head matchups in history between those two teams. These "multi-linked" weekly images on the teams' season pages may seem confusing at first, but after you click on them a few times, it will seem intuituve, and this was the cleanest way to present these links.
     Tomorrow we'll have a special advanced look at a working example of how the 'team season' page links will work, plus a sample of the team-vs-team historical matchup pages.

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     Yesterday, we told you about the Washington Redskins wearing blue for a game in 1942 in Brooklyn against the Dodgers.  After looking at the picture on that page from the first scan I had, I had believed that the runner, Dick Todd, was visible with three stripes on his arms, similar to the Dodgers' stripe patterns, and that they were a darker gray than the three stripes on the Brooklyn defender on the left side of the picture.

     After looking at a better scan of the image, however, I came to believe Bill Schaefer's explanation of the image,  Therefore, it is our determination that the 1942 Redskins were not "borrowing" the Dodgers' blue back-up unis, in place of their secondary set, but rather that they just decided to try blue, instead of the white that they had apparently last used in 1940.  Our website historian, Tim Brulia, weighed in with this observation:

"I think the Skins are wearing blue jerseys modeled after the normal maroons. If they were wearing stripes on the jerseys, I think [Arthur] Daley would have made mention of it. In my times scanning the game write-ups in the NY Times, Daley - way more than the other beat writers on the Times staff - would make mention of jersey colors.

We are going to see navy vs navy with many Packers-Bears games, some blue vs blue with the Rams and Lions, and some maroon-red with the Skins and Dodgers in the 30's & 40's. BUT for sure, there were two instances of the Redskins wearing non-maroon with Redskin heads on the sleeves, and this instance in 1942. This shot is not conclusive as to what Dick Todd is wearing here. Thus, [we should] play it safe until (or if) we ever get a better pic from this game.

As for what teams packed for road trips, normally the visiting team had to wear the secondary jerseys...but not always. In the early 50's, The Skins wore their normal maroons to Pittsburgh, and it was the Steelers who had to switch to secondary whites."

     Bill posits another possible alternative theory: "Could the Redskins have been wearing the Giants blue tops?" Well, the Giants were in Chicago (to play the navy-clad Bears) that day and assuming they only took their red uniforms with them, and assuming someone was around in New York with access to the blue uniforms, I still think it would have been unlikely that by the time that the Redskins realized they would have a need to borrow them, they would have gone to the effort of trying to procure them, when if they were in need of "emergency" alternate uniforms and were stuck having to use a non-Redskins color like blue, it would have been much easier to borrow the Dodgers' duds right there at Ebbets than to try to get uniforms from way uptown at the Polo Grounds down to Brooklyn.  As Occam's razor indicates, the simplest solution is usually the correct one (or something like that) so it's probably just that the Redskins wanted to try out blue for their backup kit that year.  But what shade of blue was it?  Was it navy or a bright "Giants" blue?  Or a honolulu blue like the Lions?  Well the newspaper image was pretty dark, so it was probably something closer to navy (besides that would probably look good with the Redskins helmet and pants colors) but with no real leads other than Daley's write up, all we know is "blue."

     Another discovery to come out of this was the helmets of the Dodgers.  In the database we had the 1940-42 Dodgers as having the "spider" helmet pattern, however, after seeing this picture, it appears that at least on this day in 1942 the Dodgers were wearing a variation known as the "cross" pattern.  There is, however, no reason to specifically believe that the 1940-41 Dodgers didn't wear both, or only wore the cross pattern.  Our final determination on this is still being discussed.

Brooklyn Dodger defenders clearly wearing the "cross" helmet pattern in 1942