Playing the Game the Right Way: How Pine Tar Clothing Was Born

If you love baseball lifestyle brands, classic baseball stories, and the culture around the game, you’re in the right place. I’m Jeff Ruprecht, a graphic designer, lifelong baseball fan, and founder of Pine Tar Clothing, a baseball apparel brand built around hustle, heart, and old‑school grit.

I launched Pine Tar a few years ago after kicking the idea around for a long time and finally deciding to turn my passion for baseball and design into something real. It hasn’t always been easy to start a baseball clothing brand from scratch, but it’s been an incredible way to stay connected to the game while using my creative skills outside of my day job.

This post is a companion to Episode 1 of the Pine Tar Podcast, where I share the origin story of the brand, what “playing the game the right way” means, and why I believe baseball is still one of the most powerful sports cultures out there.

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Growing Up with Baseball in Small‑Town Minnesota

I grew up in central Minnesota farm country, where small‑town baseball was a huge part of community life. One of my earliest organized baseball memories is a little, overgrown field behind our church — not fancy, but absolutely perfect to a kid who just wanted to play ball.

Before that, my “training” looked like a lot of classic backyard baseball: playing catch with my dad, pickup games with neighbor kids, and family softball on the pasture during holidays. Once I started playing organized youth baseball and kept going through middle school and high school, the game quickly became my world — bus rides, summer tournaments, and living for the next big game.

I pitched and played outfield, and even though our high school team never quite made the state tournament, we came close a few times, and those seasons shaped who I am.

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Minnesota Baseball, Town Ball, and an Underrated Baseball State

Most people know Minnesota as “the state of hockey,” but there’s a strong Minnesota baseball culture that flies under the radar. Once the snow melts, small towns all over the state come alive with local baseball, town ball, and Legion games.

Town ball, in particular, is something I want to highlight more on the podcast. After high school, I played Minnesota town ball for a couple of years, right out of high school and into college. Almost every little town where I grew up had a town ball team, and the level of play was legit.

That’s where I saw my first 90‑mile‑per‑hour fastball as a 19‑year‑old. In high school, 80 mph felt like gas; 90 was eye‑opening. A lot of those guys were home from college baseball programs for the summer, and it gave me a new appreciation for just how deep the talent runs in so‑called small‑town baseball communities.

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Living, Breathing, and Designing Baseball

Baseball wasn’t just a sport I played; it became a lifestyle. I watched MLB games, supported my local teams, collected baseball cards, and obsessed over the design side of the game — logos, uniforms, typography, all the details that make baseball aesthetics so iconic.

I started collecting cards as a kid and later fell in love with vintage baseball cards like turn‑of‑the‑century tobacco cards. That connection between baseball history, sports design, and storytelling is something I’ll talk about a lot on the Pine Tar Podcast — because when you understand the history of the game, you appreciate modern baseball on a whole different level.

Baseball is still called America’s pastime for a reason. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, before television and long before football took over as the most popular sport, baseball was what people gathered around.

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Baseball Coaching, Effort, and the “Right Way” to Play

Later in life, the game came back into focus through baseball coaching. I coached my sons as they came up through youth baseball, and my oldest eventually went on to play some college baseball. That meant travel teams, showcases, and seeing firsthand what it takes to keep climbing to the next level.

As a dad and coach, I found myself caring deeply about effort and attitude — not just stats. After one high school game, my son and I talked about how the team simply didn’t give 100 percent that night. That conversation stuck with me and really sharpened what I believe about “the right way” to play.

To me, playing baseball the right way means:

• Hustling on every play, no matter the score.

• Wearing dirt and grass stains proudly on your uniform.

• Bringing grit, toughness, and love for the game to the field every day.

• Respecting your teammates, coaches, umpires, and opponents.

If you go to a ballpark and see the player with the dirtiest pants, the muddiest jersey, and the beat‑up helmet, that’s usually one of your best players — the one with the “it” factor. That image of getting dirty and going all out is exactly what led to the Pine Tar name.

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The Pine Tar Clothing Name: A Metaphor for Grit

After that postgame talk about effort, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head: these guys needed to get more dirty, more invested, more all‑in. That thought led straight to pine tar — messy, sticky, gritty, and tied to old‑school baseball bats and iconic moments like the George Brett pine tar incident.

I thought, “What if there was a baseball lifestyle brand called Pine Tar Clothing?” Pine tar became the perfect metaphor for how I think the game should be played: gritty, tough, and unapologetically all‑out.

As a graphic designer, I started sketching. I drew a simple baseball emblem that eventually became the main Pine Tar logo — a clean, classic mark that felt rooted in vintage baseball branding but still modern enough for today’s baseball apparel world. Once that idea took hold, I couldn’t let it go.

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Building a Baseball Lifestyle Brand During the Pandemic

Like a lot of people, I suddenly had more time during the pandemic. MLB shut down for a while, then came back with a shortened season, empty stadiums, and a strange, silent backdrop. I missed the game badly.

So I went all‑in on the Pine Tar concept. I refined designs, started sharing ideas on social media, and slowly built momentum as people connected with the baseball lifestyle message behind the brand.

By around 2022, I’d made Pine Tar Clothing an official company, lined up production, and started selling at local events and online. In 2023, I got a huge opportunity: a spot at the College World Series in Omaha to sell Pine Tar gear for about two weeks.

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Omaha, Pop‑Ups, and Lessons from the Road

Setting up at the College World Series was a dream shot for a young baseball brand. For two weeks, I ran a pop‑up shop in Omaha, surrounded by college baseball fans, families, and players — exactly the kind of people Pine Tar was built for.

It went well, but it was also a serious business lesson. Travel, hotels, food, inventory, displays, racks — the costs add up fast when you’re doing a long event far from home. I was invited back the following year, but decided to pause and regroup so I could return smarter, better prepared, and more sustainable in the long run.

That’s the reality of building a small baseball apparel brand: there are highs, lows, and a lot of learning in between.

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Why I Started the Pine Tar Podcast

Through all of this, one thing stayed consistent: I still wanted to talk baseball. I wanted a place to share long‑form stories, dive into baseball history, highlight underrated parts of the game like town ball, and give fans an inside look at building a baseball lifestyle brand from scratch.

That’s why I launched the Pine Tar Podcast.

On the show, I plan to explore:

• What it really means to play baseball “the right way” — with hustle, heart, grit, and love.

• Conversations with Pine Tar athletes — mostly D1 college baseball players — about their journeys from youth baseball to college ball.

• Deep dives into baseball history, vintage cards, and why old stories still matter in today’s game.

• Behind‑the‑scenes looks at Pine Tar Clothing designs, logos, and the creative process behind baseball merch and branding.

Everyone has a different baseball story — some players peak in high school, some grind their way into college rosters, some battle injuries, and a few keep chasing the dream as far as it will go. Those human‑interest stories are at the heart of both the brand and the podcast.

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What’s Next — And How to Stay Connected

I’m aiming to release new Pine Tar Podcast episodes about once a week, sharing stories, gear, history, and conversations with people who live and breathe baseball.

If there’s a topic you’d love to hear about — town ball, coaching tips, baseball card collecting, brand building, or the culture of the game — I’d love your ideas.

You can find and message me on social media:

• TikTok

• Instagram

• Facebook

All at @pinetarclothing.

Thanks for reading, thanks for listening, and thanks for supporting independent baseball brands that care about playing the game the right way.