MLB's Multiyear Rebrand Rests on Five Custom Fonts

Major League Baseball has completed a multiyear rebrand built on five custom typefaces, each rooted in letterforms that appeared in baseball in the early 20th century. The league's famous silhouetted batter logo, designed in 1968 by Jerry Dior, stayed untouched. The wordmark around it changed.

The project began after MLB moved to its new New York City headquarters in 2020. The league wanted to expand professional baseball's fandom and talent, and it wanted its visual identity to feel unified. It hired Mother Design, the branding and design agency behind work for Cadillac, Tripadvisor and the scented water bottle brand Air Up.

Mother Design started building the new brand architecture in late 2022. MLB introduced it on a rolling basis beginning in 2024. The system is now complete, and it shows up across the league — in the Ballpark app, at venues, on social channels and at special events.

Who built the five fonts?

The agency tapped five type designers or foundries, each chosen for a specialty:

• MLB Script — designed by Bay Area foundry OH no Type Co., selected for its attention to quirky details. The variable typeface includes flags: the horizontal stripe from a word's final letter that underlines the word and reads as quintessentially baseball.
• MLB Flare — a handlettering style by Uruguayan foundry Tipotype, built to feel warm and charming and to honor the cultural connection between baseball and Latin America.
• MLB Franklin — a customized classic American grotesque-sans serif by Nick Sherman, the style used on scoreboards visible in stadiums during the recent World Series.
• MLB Clarendon — a customized slab-serif found throughout baseball history, with added flexibility in weights and widths from designer David Jonathan Ross.
• MLB Block — an octagonal face by Skye Dillon, a sports-branding specialist who designed the 2026 MLB All-Star Game style guide. It draws on jersey names, numerals and lettering at venues like Ebbets Field, the vanished Brooklyn ballpark where the Dodgers once played.

Why early-20th-century letterforms?

Mark Sloan, Mother Design's New York City head of design, frames the choice as continuity. Each font style existed in baseball in some form before anyone alive today was born.

"It's ensuring that we've got these visual cues and these letterforms that have been part of our visual vernacular for longer than any of us have been alive," Sloan told Fast Company. "How do we make sure that we carry that forward and we honor that tradition, but that we build them in a way that is prepared for retina screens and extremely small spaces as well as emphatic, large moments. That's really the crux of it."

The technical brief mattered as much as the history. A letterform drawn for a 1920s jersey must now survive a smartwatch screen and a stadium jumbotron. The five-typeface system gives MLB a range of voices — slab-serif gravitas, script warmth, grotesque utility — instead of one wordmark stretched across every context.

How does Latin America fit the brand?

Tipotype's role was deliberate. The cofounders, Martín Sommaruga and Vicente Lamónaca, said the Latin influence in baseball runs deeper than marketing.

"There is a long tradition of Latin American players in MLB, so the Latin influence is naturally part of the game," they wrote in an email. "The Latin community also has a strong presence not as a distinctive feature, but as a fundamental part of the sport itself."

MLB Flare carries that argument into the type system itself, rather than confining it to Heritage Month campaigns.

What did the research involve?

The team worked from books, baseball cards, ticket stubs, felt letters and the individual clubs' venues, history and ephemera. Sloan said the goal was to find visual through lines that reach back furthest but still feel as if they were designed today.

Baseball supplied plenty of raw material: jersey lettering and numerals, and logos like the interlocking NY monograms shared by the Yankees and the Mets. Sloan compared baseball to "a visual history of the country itself" and argued the sport has kept many typographic styles alive in pop culture.

"If you look at something like baseball script, for example, it's something that as Americans, it's in our visual consciousness," Sloan said. "It sort of comes in and out of fashion in the world of branding, but it's always been in fashion in baseball."

The rollout continues across MLB's app, venues and events — a bet that century-old letterforms, redrawn for retina screens, can help the league reach fans it does not yet have.