As spring creeps closer, sports fans are gearing up to celebrate a new season in professional baseball — and that includes poking fun at some of the most flawed merchandise designs we’ve seen in a while.
Overnight, sports apparel brand New Era has become the butt of online jokes for their newly released MLB Overlap 59FIFTY hat collection. Not only are the new hats nonsensical, but at least one contains a Spanish slang word for “breasts.”
The idea behind the hats is pretty straightforward — the designer took each team’s logo and placed it over top of the team wordmark. But, in reality, most of the designs wound up looking like misspellings, as most team logos are just one letter from the team’s name.
The Texas Rangers’ hat has gone the most viral. The hat was pulled from the MLB’s online store, for obvious reasons:
The hat features the Rangers’ “T” logo superimposed over the word “Texas.” And while it’s in keeping the design rules for the collection of hats, social media users were quick to point out that it actually appeared to say “Tetas” — a crass Spanish word for “breasts.”
And while the Rangers’ hat was quickly pulled from shelves Monday, there are a couple others that were borderline controversial and also appear to have been removed from the site as of Tuesday.
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For instance, the Houston Astros hat reads “Ashos.”
And the Los Angeles Angels hat reads “Anaels.”
Other designs, though none nearly as vulgar, are plain confusing.
By covering up most of the vowels in Miami, the Marlins hat has been construed as “Mmmi.”
While the Seattle Mariners hat reads more like “Masers.”
New Era and the MLB have yet to comment on the confusing design choices.
It’s not the first time a MLB hat design mishap has led to widespread mockery. Last year, a New Era design for the Oakland A’s featured an extra “S,” resulting in a hat that appeared to spell out “Ass.” It was removed from stores after backlash.
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