A PDSA Cycle in the Early Days of Baseball Uniforms

TL;DR: Early baseball teams experimented with position-specific uniforms, quickly learned it created confusion, and abandoned the idea. It's a classic example of Plan-Do-Study-Adjust–small tests, fast learning, and no stubborn attachment to a bad idea.

As someone who grew up as a big baseball fan, I somehow managed not to see the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball.

I've been watching it recently through Amazon Prime Video.

In the first episode, there was a section on Albert Spaulding. You might recognize the Spaulding name from sporting goods (they make the official NBA basketballs). He was a baseball player and was one of the first to use a leather glove.

I'm going from memory, but I think this next section was about him and his attempt at uniform innovation in the late 19th century… look at the screenshots with closed captions that tell the story of Plan, Do, Study, and Adjust…

Plan

Do

Study

Yeah, I mean if you wanted to change positions during the game, you'd have to change clothes???

Adjust

“And the experiment was quickly abandoned.”

That's a key to the Plan-Do-Study-Adjust cycle. You have to be willing to adapt or abandon… not just adopt. You can't be stubborn about assuming every idea that you implement is a good idea…. it's PDSA, not Plan-Do-Rationalize-Justify.

One of the key principles, going back to Dr. Deming, is that we mitigate risk when attempt to make an improvement by doing a SMALL test of change.

Modern-day Major League Baseball sometimes isn't great at problem solving, but they do generally test changes at the minor league level where they are, relatively, small tests of change.

This includes the use of a pitch clock, which is supposedly coming to the MLB level, something that I've blogged about before.

A Confusing Rule That Seemed to Not Be Enforced: Minor League Baseball's Pitch Clock

Other small tests of change include starting extra innings with a runner on second base as a way to shorten the length of games.

We'll see if that test is “quickly abandoned” or if it's eventually adopted.

In any workplace setting, sometimes you don't know if an idea is any good until you try it in practice… can you think of examples of “small tests of change” in your workplace?

When an Innovation Doesn't Turn Out as Predicted

Albert Spalding's uniform experiment is a great example of an innovation that might have made sense in theory but failed in practice. The idea didn't produce the intended results, created confusion instead of clarity, and was quickly abandoned. That outcome doesn't mean the attempt was foolish or irresponsible — it means reality taught a lesson that no amount of upfront reasoning could fully predict.

This is exactly what happens when people try to innovate. Some ideas work. Some don't. The key is keeping experiments small, learning quickly, and being willing to admit when an idea was a mistake — without shame, blame, or stubbornness.

As I write in The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, progress depends on making intelligent, bounded mistakes and extracting learning from them. PDSA isn't about being right on the first try; it's about turning unexpected results into better knowledge. Spalding's abandoned uniforms weren't a failure — they were a fast, visible learning cycle, and that's exactly how improvement is supposed to work.