Professional sports teams that wear black and orange colors include Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants and Baltimore Orioles, the NFL’s Cincinnati Bengals, and the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers. Popular college teams that wear black and orange include Oklahoma State and Oregon State, among others.
Who cares? Well, my kids are obsessed with Halloween to the point where basically every day, and I’m not joking, there is some sort of Halloween TV episode playing. This has evolved into a fascination with the Ghostbusters, the Addams Family, Monsters Inc. and related ghoul-centered pop culture.
Anyway, I digress. The point is, black and orange seems to always be in season around here. (It doesn’t help that my oldest’s very first team sport experience a couple years ago was with the Giants t-ball club.)
So, in an attempt to buy them clothes they like, at the risk of influencing their sport-rooting fandom, I was thinking about the different professional sports teams that wear black and orange as their primary colors.
San Francisco Giants
The Giants are one of five Caifornia MLB teams, making their way to San Francisco from New York in 1958. Their jerseys feature black lettering and orange outline, and their hats are black based with orange lettering.
Things got really fun when the Giants introduced an orange alternate jersey in the early 2010s, which was an orange jersey with black lettering and white outline. These jerseys were an homage to their late 70s road jerseys which followed the same color scheme.
Now, with what is known as “Orange Fridays” the Giants wear their orange jerseys Friday nights at home.
And then dipping more into their orange than black, their city connect “orange creamsicle” uniforms feature a completely different look altogether:
Read More: Teams That Don’t Have City Connect Uniforms
A little known fact is that when the Mets “replaced” the Giants in New York, they adopted their orange color to honor the squad that left for the west not long before their arrival. Another little-known fact is that when it comes to different sports teams with the same name, there once was a New York Giants football and baseball team.
Baltimore Orioles
Sticking with baseball, the Orioles team colors follow closely with the Giants, though feature orange more prominently – as one might expect – than their National League team color counterpart. While you don’t really know what the true color of a giant would be, it’s only right the Orioles are orange just as the Blue Jays would be blue.
Read More: College Teams with the Color Green
Here you see the home white jerseys with the orange lettering and black outline (again, opposite of the Giants).
And then here you see the orange alternate jerseys with the black lettering and white outline.
Believe it or not, the Orioles also wore orange pants for a couple of seasons in the early 1970s.
Cincinnati Bengals
Switching gears to football, but much like the Orioles and out of necessity, the Cincinnati Bengals are naturally black and orange – like a Bengal Tiger – as well.
While maybe not the first time you think of when you think black and orange, the Bengals tiger-stripe helmet – which is orange with black stripes – has become one of the most recognizable in the game.
Philadelphia Flyers
Ok, so just as if you were to close your eyes and guess what color a “giant” was, you’d probably have similar difficulty imagining what colors a team of flyers would be wearing. Since you’re here, you know the answer, but let’s get into a few other things.
On one hand, any color combination with the team name “Flyers” would be a bit random, no—unless I guess if the entire scheme was based off sky blue, cloud white, etc.
But, all of this was in fact very random, as it’s said the colors were picked before a name was settled on, and the name itself was a product of a “name the team” contest.
Confused for Black & Orange
While there are only four professional team what wear orange and black, there are a handful of others that come close! I’m talking a really dark navy blue and orange combination which upon first glance, is easy to mistake for orange and black.
Detroit Tigers
Chicago Bears
Denver Broncos
