Los Angeles Dodgers T-Shirt
Fanatics (2024)
Earlier this week, baseball fan and Reddit user sulej shared this photo of a championship t-shirt that they recently purchased from Fanatics. The shirt was designed to commemorate the 2024 World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers with the signatures of each player on their World Series roster printed around the Commissioner's Trophy on the back of the shirt. Eagle-eyed fans are likely to have already spotted the problem here. If you haven't, perhaps this will help.
This is the shirt that Fanatics released last year to commemorate the 2023 World Series Champions, the Texas Rangers. It's not the same exact style shirt, but it shares some features in common, including the Commissioner's Trophy and images of the player's signatures on the back of the shirt.
Let's take a closer look at those signatures.
Did you catch it yet?
Here, maybe a side-by-side comparison might help.
The Aroldis Chapman signature at the top right hand corner is a dead giveaway. He's bounced around the league quite a bit since he made his MLB debut in 2010 with time spent on the Cincinnati Reds, New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers before signing a one year contract to pitch out of the Pittsburg Pirates bullpen in 2024. He had a decent year for a 36 year old reliever, and he even passed Billy Wagner to have the most career strikeouts for a left-handed relief pitcher in baseball history.
One thing Mr. Chapman did not do is play for the Los Angeles Dodgers. To the best of my knowledge, none of the players whose signature appears on the Dodgers shirt ever played for them, but they definitely didn't in 2024. Fanatics just went ahead and re-used all of the signature images from last year's Rangers shirt when they designed the Dodgers shirt.
This would be an embarrassing mistake if it happened to any other company, but I'll be shocked if Fanatics will even notice. After all, they're the same company that approved this design for an Oakland Athletics hat a few months ago.
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| The official hat of John Fisher |
