Our story so far: The Yankees began wearing their sleeve ad on July 21. Five days later, on July 26, Yankees pitcher Carlos Rodón’s jersey sleeve was rolled up in a way that just happened to obscure the team’s advertising patch. Afterward, Rodón claimed to have “no idea” that this had happened. Then, last week, Rodón’s ad patch just happened to be missing for the first four innings of his start, after which the patch mysteriously reappeared for the fifth inning.
So as you can imagine, I was paying close attention to Rodón’s right sleeve when he took the mound for yesterday’s Yanks/Pirates game in Pittsburgh. And sure enough, as you can see above, his right sleeve was blank — no ad patch!
But there was a new development that I hadn’t counted on: Rodón was wearing the ad on his left sleeve! Check it out:
That shot is from the first inning, but Rodón wore the ad throughout his 6⅔-inning stint.
When Rodón has worn the sleeve ad, it has always been on his right sleeve, which is his non-throwing sleeve. That’s the case with most pitchers, which is understandable, because you’d want your throwing arm to be as unencumbered as possible. There are some pitchers who wear the ad on the throwing sleeve, but not many. In any case, I’m not aware of any other players besides Rodón who’ve had the ad jump from one sleeve to the other in the middle of the season. Just one more bit bizarre aspect to his increasingly uni-wacky 2023 campaign.
I’m confused. Are you saying that pitchers actually request to have a patch on their non-throwing sleeve? I didn’t think they had any say in the matter.
Yea I tend to agree, especially since before this season, 99% of TEAM sleeve patches went on the left sleeve across the league, and lefty pitchers never had them moved.
The idea behind the ad patches is that they’re put on the player’s front-facing sleeve. That’s obvious for position players (the sleeve facing the mound) but less so for pitchers. From the CF camera, the throwing sleeve is visible, but the view is so distant that you can’t make out the ad. The non-throwing sleeve is more visible for mound close-up shots, but those shots get less camera time. So it’s a toss-up. I’ve noticed that *most* pitchers have it on the non-throwing sleeve, but not all of them. Since the patch can go on either sleeve, I’m thinking some pitchers must have spoken up about the feel of the patch.
As for team-logo patches being moved: Prior to this year, that was never an option, so probably nobody even thought to speak up.
I’m positive at least a FEW southpaws thought to speak up prior to this year about moving the team patch and were told no…because as a lefty myself who owns a few jerseys, it’s immediately one of my first thoughts when putting them on lol
This pitcher is silently protesting from our corner in the universe when it comes to sleeve ads, is my guess. Too many strange things happening to him and the ad to be a coincidence.
I refuse to watch MLB baseball until those ad patches are gone. If that means I’ll die without ever watching another MLB game, so be it. They lost me.
I get ya, but I stopped watching long before the ad patches debuted. I’m just kind of a bemused bystander at this point.
I think my mental divorce began in the 2018 World Series. You had a hot pink telco ad garishly superimposed over all of Jackie Bradley’s handiwork at Fenway’s centerfield. They kept cutting in with cutesy commercials during pitches of tense ninth inning at bats. It just really sunk in how little MLB cared about the game and how it was only going to get worse. It’s a fun thing to keep half an eye on for me these days.
100% agree. After all, aren’t we sports fans first and foremost?
I wonder if there is a production mandate of X number of sleeve shots per game. That way the teams can tell sponsors you will have “featured sleeve shots in the even numbered innings and ‘passive shots’ the remainder of the game.
This suggests that southpaws have little input, as you notice the vast majority of teams wear a patch on the left sleeve. In the 1970s and ’80s, most teams had no patch at all.
If MLB offered a streaming package that digitally removed ALL the ads in the ballpark and on the uniforms, wouldn’t you pay for it in a split second?
Francisco Lindor has had the ad jump sleeves…but he is a switch hitter, so maybe that came into play. I did see him wear the ad on the wrong sleeve based on the handedness of the starting pitcher and how Lindor would start off batting.
Could it be that he wipes his face with that right sleeve and the ad patch was uncomfortable in doing so? So, they adjusted the placement like Troy Aikman’s 75th NFL jersey patch many moons ago (?).
Makes no sense that they’d wait nearly two months to do that.