Dodger Blue
The rich bright azure of the Los Angeles Dodgers, both a uniform color and a web color.
Dodger blue is a rich bright tone of the color azure named for its use in the uniform of the Los Angeles Dodgers. It is also a web color used in the design of web pages. The web color is not used in the Dodgers' uniform but it rather resembles the lighter blue used throughout Dodger Stadium.
Quick Facts
- Origin era
- Brooklyn Dodgers (1930s-1957)
- Cultural identity
- Unofficial team color and fan symbol
- Iconic association
- Walter O'Malley era transition to Los Angeles
- Rivalry context
- Primary identifier in rivalry with Giants and Angels
- Modern status
- Enduring global symbol of Dodgers fandom
Lore & Background
The concept of 'Dodger blue' was popularized by Tommy Lasorda with his saying 'Cut me and I'll bleed Dodger blue.' Lasorda managed the franchise in Los Angeles for 20 years from 1977 to 1996, and was on the player roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers, though he played for them only very briefly. In 1989, the team's famous Dodger blue was added to a color database. Paul Raveling, a software engineer who in 1989 was working at the Information Sciences Institute at USC, had been 'tuning' colors to be properly displayed on computer monitors. He proposed a major update to the list of color names that were supported by the X11 user interface system, including one called 'dodgerblue'. Eventually, that list of colors would be incorporated into web browsers.
Reader's Guide
The actual blue that the Dodgers currently wear is RGB-hex #005A9C. It is a shade of royal blue. Regarding the web color's RGB values, Paul Raveling notes that 'The color tuning was done on HP monitors and the colors turned out very good then. The catch is that since then, monitors seemed to have standardized on different gamma corrections.' The current standard RGB color space was defined in 1996, seven years after 'dodgerblue'.
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