Unis: Good, bad and ugly

"The dress code is always red."

That's the tagline that runs at the end of one Phillies commercial. It's a good spot - has an everyone's-in-it-together vibe without too much saccharine, hand-holding schmaltz - even if it isn't exactly accurate.

The dress code isn't always red. Sometimes it's maroon or gray or off-white. Sometimes, on the good days when nostalgia sweeps the organization along in a wistful wave, it's even powder blue.

By the end of the season, the Phils will have worn six different uniforms - seven if you count the all-red batting practice tops. There's the standard white home outfit with the red pinstripes, the cream-colored home alternate with blue hats, and the gunboat gray road uniforms. A little more than a week ago, the Fightin's donned Philadelphia Stars uniforms in honor of the Negro Leagues, and they also dusted off the sweet, disco-era baby blue retro ensembles from the mid-70s.

And they're not done yet. On July 22, the Phillies will wear the old home uniforms from 1984 - the white ones with the maroon stripes and the giant, distinctive, overinflated "P" from my youth.

That's a lot of wardrobe changes for one team, but it occurred to me that there isn't a bad jersey in the lot. Not one. They're all excellent. That's almost impossible to pull off in professional sports. The gaudy, the hideous, the head-scratching and inexplicable - that's the norm these days. (And that's just the Wizards). From the Denver Broncos' half-machine, half-horse Transformer logo to the Colorado Rockies' mid-90s color scheme, there are some pretty foul uniforms out there.

The Phillies are set apart from that sartorially challenged crowd. In fact, all the teams in Philly dress fairly well. Some of us were sitting around Page 2 HQ - otherwise known as the Inquirer sports department conference room, complete with a mini-fridge and some chairs you can even sit on without breaking - when we started talking about that, about some great uniforms past and present, as well as some jerseys that weren't so hot (the Shawn Bradley-era star-stamped Sixers getups, for example.)

That led to an idea. As part of the new, revamped Page 2 - and in an attempt to get the reader more involved - we've been posing questions on our Facebook page, SportsInq. We started out by asking you to submit stories about your first glove or the foul ball you caught (or didn't, in some cases). Some of those, a good number of them, later appeared in the paper.