In this respect, I’m sorry to report, Canada’s only Major League team is strictly minor league.

From a design perspective, the Toronto Blue Jays are a mess. That’s certainly not news. They’ve been wandering in the design desert since their inception in 1977. They’ve tried a number of different approaches over the years, but like a man in quicksand, they just seem to go deeper in their funk the more they try to get out of it.

I am not one of those purists who believe that every good baseball uniform has be to a variant of the Yankees’ look or the Dodgers’ look. There is lots of creative space beyond those two templates, as marvelous as they are. Clearly, the Jays are interested in exploring that territory. But just as clearly, they’ve failed in finding a Third Way. Applaud them for trying? OK. But let’s give them the respect of honesty. The Jays’ look is painfully bad.

The club’s latest iteration, which debuted back in 2004, adopted the overdone black accents just when other clubs who had gone black earlier were having second thoughts. The Royals and the Reds have retreated from the black in recent years (let’s pray the Mets follow suit). As a result, the Jays are very late to the party, like a guy who discovered Nehru jackets in 1981. The dominant blacks and grays are particularly absurd considering Toronto has the color scheme pretty much decided for them right there in the name of the franchise. Is it so strange to insist that the Blue Jays be blue?

The team’s primary cap logo — a blue jay’s head emerging from a stylized, almost sideways J — is reminiscent of the silly menacing bird heads that have become the norm in the NFL in recent years (Falcons, Seahawks, Eagles). And it’s secondary cap logo — honestly, why even have a secondary cap logo? — is a gray T that lookslike a collision between two garden slugs. The essence of awful. The Jays’ sense of aesthetics is so distorted now, they can’t even get throwback unis right. In ’08, the team decided to bring back their powder blues from the 1980s. Road unis for home games — seriously, that’s a disgrace.

Yet, what the current uni set replaced was ugly as well, a misbegotten variation on the Jays’ original look that had strayed far into minor-league territory, as modeled here by former Rookie of the Year Eric Hinske. Yep, strictly Saskatoon.

It must be a difficult position to be the only non-US team in the big leagues, and if the Toronto Blue Jays are intent on underlining their otherness in their uniform, then who can blame them? But the Jays’ current look only serves to create the impression that there isn’t a decent designer to be found from Vancouver to Nova Scotia. 

Of course, the wretched state of the current design and its immediate precursor also makes the Jays’ original uni set — even with its enormous jersey logo centered right over the breadbasket — look pretty damn nice by comparison. But, hey, I liked the Montreal Expos’ tri-color 1980s look too, so maybe my own judgment is suspect.

Let’s not forget that the Blue Jays were back-to-back World Series champs back in the early ’90s, when they wore an improved variation on their . Those days turned out to be the Jays’ glory days in both play and uni design. If they’d just harken back to that grand ole time, then Jays’ fans with a sense of style might dance just like Joe Carter did after connecting off Mitch Williams.

Not that I would ever suggest the Phillies drop more than a hundred years of tradition and adopt some faux-menacing hyper-masculine new look — The Philadelphia Phornicators, anyone?

But let’s just acknowledge the jarring dissonance between the men who play in Philly and what they wear. Someone coming in from the cold to baseball would have to ask the question: Why are these guys named for a female horse — an adolescent female horse, at that — and why are they sporting the vapid, simplistic shade of red favored by pre-schoolers everywhere?

As a product of design, the Phillies’ unis are lovely, no doubt about it. In fact, my heart skips a beat every time I see those tiny blue stars that dot the i’s in “Phillies.” They’re a kind of reverse image of the brilliant touch in the Dodgers’ set, the flaming red front number in a sea of Dodger blue. 

But, they’re too pretty for Philadelphia. 

The Phillies also have a typography problem. They wear the P on their caps, but everyone knows that the word “Philadelphia” begins with the softer F sound, and though anyone with the literacy skills of a second grader get its that the “Ph” makes an F-sound, it’s still jarring enough to the brain to feel a little off-key. It’s as if I started a softball team called the Writers and put a W on our caps. Not quite kosher. The Pirates, who also wear the P, don’t have this kind of problem. 

The solution is simple. In 1992, the Phils dropped the uniform worn by Schmidt, Carlton and Luzinski (and, let’s not forget, the criminally underappreciated Wayne Twitchell) and adopted the one they wear today. Of course, several teams were dropping the ugly designs of the Jimmy Carter era and going throwback at the time. And, almost always, that was a good idea.

But not in Philly. This is one instance when the 1970s deserves another look-see. 

First off, the color palette was much better (if you don’t count the garish road powder-blues). The red of the old Phillie unis was a more complex and nuanced red, a burgundy really, and several degrees more pleasing to the eye than the candy-apple look of today. The typeface of the uniform numbers was, at the time, the most elegant in the league. And the logo, the famous humpbacked P with the baseball-like swirl in the middle worked better too. That P was so stylized that it almost suggested an F. It brilliantly reconciled the Phillies’ typography problem.

Today’s uniforms aren’t an eyesore; they just look like they were designed with the Phillie Phantic in mind first, and Ryan Howard, second. And why wouldn’t you want to evoke the halcyon days of Schmidt,  Carlton and Bake McBride? Utley and Victorino would make those glory-days unis rock. 

Oh, and Phillie fans, don’t think of the gorgeous burgundy of those bygone days as the color of cabarnet. Just think of it as the color of dried blood. That’s more redolent of Philadelphia than anything Charlie Manuel’s wearing nowadays.