On July 23, 1999, the Milwaukee Brewers took part in what’s arguably the most unusual theme night in franchise history, both to that point and in the more than quarter-century that would follow that fateful contest.
That game, a 5-4 loss to the Florida Marlins during a season the Brewers would finish 74-87 and part ways with longtime manager Phil Garner, isn’t exactly notable for anything that happened between the baselines. Rather, it endures—in spite of Major League Baseball’s best effort to bury its existence—due to when the game was supposed to be taking place. Yes, exactly 27 years ago today, the Brew Crew took the field in Miami as part of a “Turn Ahead The Clock Night” promotion.
The futuristic alternative to MLB’s “Turn Back The Clock Night” games (that started in professional baseball in 1990) was actually created in 1998, when a Seattle Mariners marketing director convinced M’s players and personnel to augment the game day experience in a fun, lighthearted way to envision what baseball might be like in the year 2027—the team’s 5oth anniversary. Uniforms of both the Mariners and visiting Kansas City Royals were drastically modified, scoreboard images paid homage to sci-fi properties, and stadium signage was temporarily changed.
The award-winning promotion was well-received by players and fans alike, prompting the industrious suits in the league office to stage similar league-wide “Turn Ahead The Clock” promos during the 1999 season. This time around, the so-called clock was being moved ahead to the year 2021, likely as a nod to the promotion’s new corporate sponsor, Century 21.
Though every team was supposed to participate in “turning the clock ahead,” eight teams flat out refused, including historic franchises like the Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Cincinnati Reds. The teams who did fall in line essentially repeated what the Mariners did the season before. However, instead of full-on uniform redesigns, most teams simply had their existing logos or enlarged on garish sleeveless jerseys that, almost vest-like in nature, disrupted throwing motions.
To Milwaukee’s credit, they actually did a bit more than the bare minimum by emblazoning their caps and jerseys with their original mascot, Barrelman, for the first time since Bernie Brewer took over in 1978 and by having their team and player names run vertically up jerseys. Conversely, the Marlins basically blew up their normal logo, went sleeveless, wore the same hats, and called it a night.
Aside from uniform changes, the future-focused gimmick essentially leaned on the presence of some inflatable aliens scattered throughout the many empty seats at Pro Player Stadium, recycling Seattle’s idea for fake 2020’s ballpark billboards, and renaming positions things like “intermediate station” (shortstop) and “right sector” (right field).
The Brewers-Marlins “Turn Ahead The Clock Night” game was the fourth of 14 total MLB games to adopt the theme in 1999. Faced with an overwhelmingly negative response from fans, players, and media that ranged from utter indifference to abject contempt, Major League Baseball quietly did away with the secondhand idea after ’99 and they haven’t exactly make it easy to find much footage from those games since.
Fittingly, only the Mariners and Royals have opted to turn the clocks ahead again this century. In 2018, they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the promotion by donning similar uniforms to those they wore in 1998 when they unknowingly set one of baseball’s most infamous theme nights into motion. While baseball’s “Turn Ahead The Clock Night” never caught on (probably with good reason), Brewers fans who want to imagine what the sport would look like in the faraway year of 2021 will always have the events of July 23, 1999.
