KAWS Steps Up to the Plate: Inside Brian Donnelly’s Untitled MLB Capsule

Fanatics and Complex tap the Companion creator for a baseball collection that follows the Takashi Murakami playbook — with the Dodgers and Yankees rumored to anchor the lineup

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• The Tease
• Who Is KAWS
• The Murakami Blueprint
• Dodgers, Yankees, or Both
• KAWS Already Speaks Sports
• What the Capsule Might Include
• Why This Collide Makes Sense Now
• When Will It Drop

Major League Baseball has confirmed its next major fashion crossover is coming, and this time the convincer is Brian Donnelly, the New York artist known worldwide as KAWS. The announcement arrived the way most modern streetwear reveals do: a single teaser image posted to social media, with no confirmed release date, no full lookbook, and no official product list. The project has reportedly been assembled with Fanatics, MLB’s longtime licensing and merchandising partner, working alongside Complex, the culture outlet that has become MLB’s go-to media partner for capsule rollouts. Beyond the initial image, MLB has not disclosed further specifics, though industry watchers expect additional details to surface soon.

The pairing tracks with a broader shift in how professional sports leagues are courting audiences outside the traditional fan base. Rather than licensing team logos to apparel companies and calling it a day, MLB has increasingly borrowed the language of art-world collide, treating jerseys and fan gear as canvases for artists with existing culture cachet. KAWS, whose signature crossed-out eyes and X motifs have appeared on everything from Dior runway sculptures to Uniqlo T-shirts, fits squarely into that strategy.

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Donnelly’s career began in New York’s graffiti scene in the 1990s, where he built a reputation altering bus-stop and phone-booth advertisements before shifting into gallery painting, vinyl toy design, and large-scale public sculpture. His Companion and BFF characters, instantly recognizable by their X-ed out eyes, have become some of the most reproduced images in contemporary art. That crossover appeal has made him one of the most commercially active artists working today, with a résumé spanning Comme des Garçons, Supreme, A Bathing Ape, Dior, and Nike’s Jordan Brand.

His market value extends well past streetwear. A 2005 KAWS painting mixing Beatles and Simpsons imagery sold for $14.8 million at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction, a record that underscores how thoroughly he has bridged fine art and mass-market product design.

 

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MLB’s KAWS project is not the league’s first attempt at this kind of high-art crossover. In 2025, Fanatics and Complex worked together to launch a full collection with Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami as part of the MLB World Tour, layering his signature smiling-flower and superflat character work across team merchandise. That rollout established the template MLB now appears to be repeating: tap an artist with global recognition well outside sports circles, keep the initial reveal deliberately minimal, and let Complex’s editorial reach build anticipation ahead of a full drop.

Framed against that precedent, the KAWS project reads less like a one-off marketing stunt and more like the second installment of an ongoing MLB artist-collaboration series, one aimed at pulling art collectors, sneakerheads, and streetwear buyers into the ballpark merchandise conversation.

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No teams have been officially confirmed, but early speculation points to the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees anchoring the capsule. Both organizations carry the kind of built-in global visibility — and existing streetwear crossover show — that would make sense for an artist of KAWS’s stature. New York is also personal territory for Donnelly, who has lived and worked in the city for most of his career, previously partnering with the Brooklyn Nets on a full City Edition uniform package. Nothing beyond speculation has been confirmed, and MLB, Fanatics, and KAWS’s studio have not issued statements naming specific franchises.

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This would not be Donnelly’s first venture into professional sports uniform design. He previously partnered with the Brooklyn Nets to create the team’s City Edition uniforms, applying his design lang  to on-court apparel in a way that translated his gallery aesthetic into functional sports gear. That project offers a useful preview of how his view identity might read across baseball jerseys, caps, and warmup gear: restrained use of his X motif and muted, almost monochrome colorways rather than an overload of his more cartoonish character work.

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Based on the teaser and MLB’s stated ambitions, the collection is expected to include both fan-facing apparel and on-field show pieces — a combination that would put KAWS’s design work on both retail racks and, potentially, players themselves. That dual approach mirrors the Murakami rollout, which spanned everything from replica jerseys to accessories, and suggests MLB wants the collaboration visible across the full spectrum of merchandise, not confined to a single product category.

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MLB has spent recent seasons courting a younger, culture engaged audience that may not follow box scores closely but does follow shoe release, gallery openings, and streetwear release calendars. Partnering with an artist whose work already commands six-figure resale prices and museum retrospectives gives the league instant credible with that crowd, while Complex’s involvement ensures the rollout gets covered with the same editorial attention typically reserved for a Jordan Brand or Supreme release. For KAWS, the partnership extends his reach into a fan base — baseball’s — that overlaps meaningfully with, but isn’t identical to, his existing sneaker and fashion collector base.

The timing also lines up with a wider pattern of major sports properties treating artist collide as a recurring content strategy rather than a one-time novelty. The NBA, NFL, and individual franchises have all experimented with limited-run artist uniforms and capsules in recent years, but MLB’s approach — pairing a single artist with a dedicated media partner for a staged, multi-week rollout — has increasingly become its own distinct model. If the KAWS project follows the Murakami collection’s cadence, expect a teaser phase, a confirmed-team reveal, and a full product drop spaced out over several weeks rather than a single announcement.

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As of this writing, MLB has not disclosed a release date, pricing, or a confirmed product list. Given the pattern set by the Murakami union, a fuller reveal — including team confirmations and specific pieces — is expected to follow the initial teaser within weeks rather than months.