Orioles phenom Gunnar Henderson has had a very uni-centric first week in the big leagues. First he swung out of his helmet while hitting a home run in his first game. Moreover, ever since he was called up to the O’s, people have been contacting me to ask about the back of his jersey. It appears that they positioned his number a bit too low, creating too much of a gap between the number and the NOB. (We mentioned it in last Thursday’s Ticker.)
As you can see above, they finally fixed that last night. Looks like the NOB is unchanged, while the number has been moved up a bit.
But here’s the thing: Prior to last night, all of Henderson’s jerseys had the big number/NOB gap — not just the home jersey. Check out his road and alternate jerseys (yes, the Orioles have managed to wear four different jerseys in Henderson’s first six days on the roster):
That’s pretty bizarre. It looks like when Henderson was called up to the bigs on Sept. 1, the Orioles’ stitcher — or a staffer at the Fanatics factory — went to great pains to letter up all four of his jerseys exactly the same (wrong) way. Whoever that person was, they get points for consistency but not for aesthetics.
Now that they’ve fixed the home jersey, it’ll be interesting to see if they’ve made corresponding fixes to the other three. For that matter, did they actually fix the home jersey, or did they just pull it from circulation (maybe to be auctioned off later..?) and replace it with a corrected version? I’ll see if I can find out — stay tuned.
(My thanks to everyone who pointed out weird spacing on Henderson’s jerseys, and doubleplusthanks to Justin Hillman for letting me know about last night’s jersey fix.)
The ironic thing is that odd spacing is reminiscent of how the Orioles did it on their ‘70s and ‘80s jerseys… link
That’s not irony…that’s coincidence.
That number spacing was the first thing I noticed when Gunnar Henderson debuted, a sign my uni watching skills are as sharp as ever. My thinking was that they had his jersey prepared but just with NOB, but added the number after the fact. .But I didn’t realize his home white, black, and orange jerseys had this same treatment. A little mystery but at least there’s consistency!
For what it’s worth at least Adley Rutschman didn’t seem to have this same issue with his jerseys when he see debuted, which makes me wonder if this was just a one-time thing (but just across four different jerseys).
Love the cake, I almost get a hint of Bengal’s Zubaz :)
The number and name look too close now. I think they overcorrected.
I think it’s perfect as it is. Slightly high positioning looks much better than slightly low positioning.
Mark, I was waiting for you to weigh in on this! Thanks for doing so.
I think the Uniburger logo is “UNI” rotated 90 degrees.
Holy shit, you’re right! I didn’t pick up on that. Good spot!
Damn, you’re good…
Holy cow, that cake is awesome!
The cake is amazing, and from that one photo it looks like the ribboning (or whatever you call it) of the actual cake matches up with the stripes on the icing.
The jersey issue with Henderson is a common problem in MLB. On many jerseys, the name and especially the numbers are situated too far down the jersey.
I saw someone over the weekend, I believe with Washington? where the bottom of the number could be tucked in to the pants. Some of this comes from lengthy last names, and names with Jr on the end. Anyway, it’s a terrible look.
That cake is awesome!
My dad’s birthday is this weekend, I’d try to bake him a cake rendered in his favorite team’s design, but alas, he doesn’t like sports. Hell, he doesn’t even really like cake that much.
Pie it is!
Lee
I love the Bengals cake! The best uni-centric dessert I’ve seen in a long time. As for Henderson’s jersey, after seeing the ones with too much space between his NOB and number, the “correct” one almost feels too compressed. If they could split the difference, that would feel about right to me.
Agree, the number is a bit too high right now. Looks better than too low. I think the arching of the NOB adds to the warped sense of balance between name and number in both the previous and the current version. With a straight NOB it would have been easier to balance the distance to the number. But arched NOB’s are cooler on baseball and basketball jerseys. For hockey and football I prefer straight ones. For soccer no NOB at all, but that is my idiosyncracy.