Oh, New Era…you’ve done it again.
In their latest attempt to create another new cap design, New Era has ended up stepping in it again. This time, their desire to create a new line of merchandise has caused one of those new designs to be removed from their online store, due to the presence of a Spanish vulgarity created by the cap’s too-clever-by-half design motif.
This isn’t the first time New Era has had major issues with their cap designs.
Remember back in 2018, when MLB unveiled Fourth of July caps with the opening words of the United States Constitution?
Paul quickly pointed out the mistake, which actually led MLB to removing the inaccurate quote from the brim of the caps.
That was followed up this year by releasing St. Paddy’s Day caps with the wrong symbol.
The latest batch of specialty caps — which retail for $45 — range from stupid to awful. The new set of caps are called the “Overlap” collection, the gist of which is a questionable series of designs where a team’s script or wordmark has a cap logo superimposed on top of the wordmark, hence the “overlap.”
Perhaps no one thought that superimposing a letter over other letters, to in essence create a new “word,” was bad design. The Rangers cap (which we’ll get to momentarily) actually ended up spelling out a vulgarity in Spanish. Other teams’ caps didn’t fare much better.
“BoBon”
“AsHos”
“AnAels”
“PaSDes”
“NaWals”
You get the idea.
It’s one thing that these caps are just a terrible design. But the Rangers’ offering — in which their “T” logo was superimposed over the “X” in Texas, literally translates to a Spanish word for breasts.
If you click the image below, you can see the cap in its original form:
Once the error was discovered, the cap was pulled from both the MLB and Rangers online stores, which are operated by Fanatics.
MLB officials, according to The Dallas Morning News, declined to comment Monday.
So — if you’re one of those cap collectors who buys every cap for your team (or even if you’re not) — it appears you won’t be able to purchase a Rangers version. Of course, this could have been avoided if this entire collection were never created New Era had used the Rangers script logo instead of their wordmark. It’s unclear whether NE will replace the “TeTas” cap or whether the situation will be rectified with a new mashup wordmark on the cap.
For those of you who are cap collectors, I’d love your reactions specifically. For everyone else, what are your thoughts?
How does “Ashos” and “Anaels” get overlooked? LOL
Totally-those are just as bad, if not worse!
It feels like they caught the Angels possible look, and shifted the Logo so that it didn’t cover the “E”. THAT one would have been funny!
Also, it’s weird to not be able to sell a hat that says “Tetas”, but we have a National Park named the Grand Tetons, which is the exact same word, but in French
Yeah when I hiked those as a 13 yr old you can bet I made that joke like a hundred times…
I like Anaels; it’s the name of an actual archangel:
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Baseball people.
Again.
Can’t get out of their own way.
Why is the picture of the Rangers hat blurred out? The first time I understand but do you really think its that offensive?
It’s a joke
I thought so too, but then the article describes it as “vulgarity” multiple times…?
So either no one bilingual was in on the design process for the Rangers cap; or someone bilingual, but without a voice in the process, saw the design and decided that wasn’t the day to fight ignorance.
Or to have a very, very big laugh at the expense of the others.
Also a possibility!
“You saw it, right?”
“Yes, saw it. Keep quiet, though.”
First of all -AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (and not being political so I’ll just say this is why you have to have someone that speaks other languages on staff.)
Secondly – should have left them up. Would have made a killing with the spawns of the dudes that bought the University of South Carolina “Cocks” hats in the 2000s
Lastly – Angels and Stros hats not blameless either
I graduated from a suburban Chicago high school in 1997.
And, despite being 850-ish miles from Columbia, roughly 20% of the dudes I knew
had the South Carolina “bar” hat you’re talking about.
I remember seeing UMASS hats in the 90s with the M stitching removed.
Reminds me of the 90’s when kids would take a black felt pen to a section of the white Sox logo to make it say “Sex”
Furman University sold a bunch as well
New Era produces so many hats. Like the New Era site sells 200+ Yankees hats in different designs.
It’s clear the company throws design ideas at the wall and sees what sticks.
I get the hate for it, but it is fun to wear a hat that no one else has. I like to wear unique stuff, so it’s kinda fun in that sense.
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Don’t forget that a few months ago New Era had a similar conundrum with the (then) Oakland A’s. The design made it say “ass”, which feels extremely fitting.
Seriously, how hard is it to double check these things?
The A’s version of this hat reads exactly that way.
And is an accurate assessment of the state of the team
I do enjoy the NaWals hat. Much more fun team name.
JFC.
This is hilarious and I am soooo bummed – I want a Tetas hat. Actually, both of the Astros and Rangers hats are kind of correct (at least from other fan bases looking in). OhmyGod, I just can’t with the AsHos… We are never gonna live this one down. Oh well, Astros fans are used to it.
Hahahaha, what a ridiculous collection and what a horrible design. I hope some fans were still able to get that Rangers hat before it was pulled off the sites. Highly collectable by now.
As a Spanish speaker I don’t find “tetas” a terrible vulgarity, but yeah, probably not on brand. But that hat could have made a killing. I mean, that cracked me up and I’d certainly buy a couple just because the league and New Era get to look preposterous.
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“Oxford study on great tits finds birdsongs evolve due to demographic …”
Heard about this on NPR.
At least they are willing to acknowledge that the Houston team are ASHOS
Seems to indicate there is zero quality control or thought process put into the designs. What probably happened was:
“How can we create another piece of merch, what haven’t we done yet?
“Cap logo overtop the wordmark?”
“Sounds good, load the graphics up and print ’em”
Also wondering what the Yankees version looks like, is it the cap NY over top of the slightly different jersey NY?
It was over their New York Yankees cursive script. The whole thing is a disaster. We’ll never get a firm understanding of their QC and vetting of designs.
Also the cynic in me feels like the decisionmakers saw these caps ready for posting, recognized that some would be questionable and still ran with it to capitalize on the “any press is good press” angle.
Surely there must be a better business model than making these extremely stupid hats
Is there actually a steady market for this flood of crap? Who has the money to buy this garbage? Who needs a closet full of of caps, jerseys and t-shirts for the same team….or multiple teams for that matter? Guess the economy is doing better than I thought. Folks have money to burn.
There must be… I looked at Astros hats and there were like 10 off-colored hats from the “Big League Chew” line that were just awful. There was even a hat in Mariners colors. I am guessing New Era has to be in control and the teams can only object if it is really bad or says TITS.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. While obvious its date was set based on the (itself inaccurate) assumed date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Fourth of July is not a holiday dedicated to celebrating the Declaration of Independence. It’s a holiday celebrating the United States. The Constitution is obviously an important thing in American history and culture. There is nothing inaccurate about celebrating the Constitution on the Fourth of July, any more than celebrating anything about America other than the Declaration is.
*face palm*
I presume you disagree. What do you think is wrong in my argument here?
The holiday is not “The 4th of July” Its INDEPENDENCE Day.
Okay, sure. Like I said – of course its inarguable that the date was set for reasons related to the Declaration of Independence. But do you disagree that Independence Day is an all-around national day celebrating the United States generally?
And if so, why is celebrating the Constitution not valid? Another perspective I’ll offer: I think most people would find it hard to dispute that the flag of the United States is prominently featured in a great deal of material related to Independence Day, and that that seems totally normal and natural But the “stars and stripes” design did not exist on July 4 1776, in its current form or any form. Is that not equally “inaccurate” by the logic that says any reference to the Constitution should be verboten here?
The AsHos is hat is top seller already. Get it before they take it down!
I wonder if that hat is made in China. Remember what that guy in the Hong Kong protests a couple of years ago said about why you can’t trust China?
Who could’ve possibly seen this coming. I mean it’s not like the vast majority of major league cap logos are letters to begin with. How could new era be expected to know that. They’d have to make the caps themselves…er…I mean…
Ironically, New Error may initially have tried using the Rangers script and realized it spelled out RanTers – didn’t want fans ranting about how idiotic it looked.
Surprisingly the ChiCago and CinCinnati hats almost sort of work. But they still suck.
Vamanos Tetas Grande! needs to be chanted at games
I laughed hard at that.
Just checked the whole list – Seattle is the maSers, Atlanta (only?) uses a blue-over-red that really clashes, and the Dbacks had literally says “AriAna” – I wonder if it comes in Grande?
Can’t upvote here, but you’ve earned one – well done.
The “AriAna” hat is the opposite of the “TeTas” hat. It’s the “No TeTas” hat. Or at least, not “Grande”.
Vulgarities or sounding-like-vulgarities aside, all of these are just plain stupid. It makes you wonder how something like this gets through so many levels of development, mock-up, management approval and production, and NOBODY says “this is stupid”, “this translates badly”, “this is a problem”, or some combination thereof.
Whenever anything like this makes it this far, it seems to me the company that produced it must be paying some really lazy and/or incompetent people. Yikes.
I mean, the hilarity of the designs aside, that has to be the dumbest concept for a hat design that I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. They must be running out of ideas.
Sweet Mary Joseph there are some amazing stupid caps on this website.
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I know, let’s make a Pirates cap using Phillies colors *and* call it “Cardinal” red!
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Words fail. Every team has this “sands” motif. All should be incinerated.
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Please. Stop.
Note: They didn’t stop.
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I will definitely be looking for fans who were able to purchase these before they were pulled. These are too funny!!!!
All those caps are horrible and exhausting.
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I swear that some of these are only intended to be a viral marketing campaign. They know what they’re doing.
Haha
And last year New Era did an overlap cap that read A’s s.
In the mid 1990s, the Houston Astros decided their Florida State League affiliate should represent the city of Kissimmee rather than Osceola County. The Osceola Astros were then changed to the Kissimmee Cobras. The new nickname was important because without that switch, the team would have been called the Kissimmee Astros.
Sorry, but the Houston cap – AsHos – could not be more accurate.
I know an ARIANA. She will like the ARIZONA hat
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Many if not most of us understand design, here, so probably I don’t have to point out that this is for some inexplicable reason an intentional and blatant example of a merger, which is something that would disqualify many designs and most pictures/images from making it through to the next draft. They literally placed one logo on top of another, most if not all of these being words/letters (which is another major red flag, using letters/words in ways that are not 100% intentional) in ways that render one illegible (at least in its original form) and the other blends into the whole in ways that they obviously didn’t plan for. It’s not just an ugly design concept (and it is), it’s riddled with basic design flaws that are taught in low level design classes, as well as being pretty obvious to even the untrained eye. This is a head scratcher of the highest order.
The Nationals hat looks pretty cool. The others are atrocious.
my favorite might be the Car Stals for the cardinals one
Why do they *really* have to pull the Rangers cap?
1. It would totally sell out.
2. They would be all over the ballpark.
3. It’s actually a fun quality control issue, for a change.
4. Breasts are a big part of several teams and leagues October marketing initiatives.
What is so scarey about some tetas?
Breasts are vulgar. Got it.
Just change the color to pink and bring it back in May when they promote Breast Cancer Awareness
Chef’s kiss.
Fans of Ariana Grande must be thrilled that the Diamondbacks now have a hat with her name on it! (Check their hat in this series—the “A” logo covers the “zo” in “Arizona”, so it now says, “Ariana”.)
This is what you get if you insist on churning out new models every week. Produced in a country with little or no affection for baseball, so shrugs at designs like this one instead of an alarmed wait a minute reaction. If New Era were to produce the official Political Party Hat of the country where they manufacture I am sure there would be a lot of checks, controls and reviews before that hat would be on the market.
Does this mean MLB has canceled “Pornography at the Park” Day? The whole family had tickets!!!
Next year they will release caps with the team names spelled backwards.. because “any old ****in thing” right?