All posts with the 'Ken Griffey Jr.' tag appear below.

Before I get to the latter half of that title, here’s the latest on the Griffey PE front…

As you can see, Junior recently broke out his first Chicago White Sox PE’s.  The pair on the left might have actually been worn earlier in the year, but the white accents were obscured by his pants.  The pair on the left on the other hand show off some great colorblocking that we haven’t seen in these yet… here’s a rendering:

Both of those and more will be in the PE Gallery soon.  But now, here’s what many of you Griffey fans and retro sneakerheads have been waiting for…

Nike will be releasing the Air Max Griffey 1 Retro in the summer of 2009. As of now, the only known colorways are black/white/teal and royal/white/yellow. That’s all that I’m allowed to say at the moment, but pics might be coming soon… I’ll keep you posted.

8 Comments / Sep 22.08 / MLB / by Mark

The MLB trade deadline is always a great time for baseball… teams gear up to make playoff runs, superstars swap uniforms, and new cleats are customized with new colors.  Here’s the breakdown of how this year’s deadline affects the a handful of MLB cleats…

(PlayerExclusive.com Photo Illustration; Original Photos by Jim Rogash/Getty Images and Al Behrman/AP Photo)

Manny Ramirez to the Dodgers: This was the most shocking trade of the bunch, and I’m really looking forward to what Nike customizes for Manny.  My Photoshopped image above shows him in a Dodger-ized PE of the Fuse cleats he’s recently been wearing in Boston, and while it’d be great to see something like that in LA, here’s my guess about what will happen: he’ll start off by wearing a blue GR of the 5-Tool or Fuse, and he’ll break out a new Fuse PE or maybe even a Max MVP PE in a couple of weeks.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if he just went with the white / blue Max MVP… Russell Martin has already worn these for a couple of games this month, so the Dodgers are apparently one of the few teams getting these.

Ken Griffey Jr. to the White Sox: This one is confusing for the White Sox, great for Griffey, and awful for footwear.  With white, black, red, and grey, Griffey was able to lace up a ton of different colorways of his Swingman Remix signature cleat in Cincinnati.  Now that he’s with the Sox, we’ll probably only be seeing black / black, black / white, and black / grey… hopefully Nike will mix it up and start doing new colorblocking on the different upper elements.

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4 Comments / Jul 31.08 / MLB / by Mark

In the next few weeks, I’ll be mixing it up between new footwear coverage and some recaps of the first-half cleats from the ‘08 MLB season. One of the best stories to develop this year has been the return of the Ken Griffey Jr. signature shoe.

For the past few seasons, Griffey has worn PE’s of his older signature models on newer Nike midsoles as well as a few PE’s of non-signature shoes. They looked great, but as one of baseball’s greatest enduring stars, it was surprising to see Griffey go without a new signature cleat since 2004. This year, Nike decided to change that with the Air Swingman Remix:

While it’s technically not a completely “new” shoe (it combines the iconic designs of the Griffey 1 and Griffey 2), this is clearly one of the most exciting cleats that we’ve seen in years. They feature 20 “dots” on the upper to commemorate Junior’s 20 years in the league, a Swingman logo embossed into the medial side in addition to the logo on the Griffey 2-inspired heel, and a few other design elements that just make these look amazing (pics via NT’s gotta be tha shoes). The cement pattern on the above shoe is part of the PE — it won’t be on the retail version. The pictured model is shown on Junior below:

(AP Photo/Al Behrman)

Griffey has worn a few other colorways of these this year (including black/red, black/white/silver, and all black pairs), but most of these should be available for purchase this fall (see page 3 of the ‘09 catalog updates here). A bizarre thing has happened with this signature shoe, however — other MLB players are getting player exclusives of them. Nike might be doing this to honor Griffey in his 600 HR milestone year (or they might just be pushing these hard for their upcoming release). My guess is that the players wearing them have been hand-selected by Junior himself.  Griffey has often spoken out on the lack of African-Americans in baseball, so it would make sense that he’d have Nike send PE’s to Jimmy Rollins, Orlando Hudson, and Carl Crawford…

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14 Comments / Jul 19.08 / MLB / by Mark