Major League Baseball's Wardrobe Malfunction
The league's awful new jerseys speak to a broader problem.
Dear readers,
It’s official: the members of Dartmouth’s men’s basketball team have chosen to unionize with SEIU Local 560 by a vote of 13-2. (We can’t lie — we’re a little curious about the two holdouts.)
While it might not seem like a big deal that a bunch of Ivy Leaguers have joined a union, the implications of the team’s decision could be far-reaching. The powers that be at Dartmouth have already appealed the decision to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which could be forced to decide once and for all whether college athletes ought to be considered employees of their universities. (As we’ve covered previously, the Board appears to be friendly to this argument.) If the NCAA challenges the NLRB’s decision, the Dartmouth Case could make its way to the Supreme Court, where the conservative majority appears eager to undercut the NCAA’s amateurism model.
A SCOTUS ruling against the NCAA could usher in an entirely new era in college sports. But given that we’ve written quite a bit about this whole issue already in the past, we thought we’d focus on something a little bit different this week: Major League Baseball’s shitty new jerseys.
-Ian and Calder
Have you ever heard of “the white party”?
If you follow celebrity athletes on social media, you’ve probably seen the gathering pop up on your feed in recent years. Over Fourth of July weekend every year, a billionaire by the name of Michael Rubin hosts a blowout party at his $50-million Bridgehampton mansion, with everyone who’s anyone on the guest list. The dress code is — you guessed it — all white, so Rubin’s guests show up in various alabaster outfits, knowing the paparazzi will be swarming. And Rubin spares no expense for his high-profile guests: opulent spread of food, well-stocked bars, celebrity DJs and the other accoutrement that the rich and famous have come to expect.
Rubin made all the cash to fund his annual blowout by starting a sports merchandise company called Fanatics, which has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. In recent years, Fanatics has been contending with customers’ complaints that their merchandise — which includes replica sports jerseys as well as signed collectibles and trading cards — is, to put it bluntly, overpriced shit. Most of this grousing was limited to Twitter and Reddit threads until earlier this spring, when Fanatics rolled out the official in-game jerseys that they designed in partnership with Nike for the upcoming MLB season. It’s kind of hard to describe how terrible these new jerseys look, so we’ll let you examine them for yourselves. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of last year’s jersey (on the left) and the new Fanatics jersey, on the right:And here are Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers this season for a combined sum above $1 billion, sporting the kind of obviously see-through pants that would be embarrassing (and plausibly illegal) at a Little League game.
The complaints from players and fans started rolling in immediately: The material looked and felt cheap, the pants were practically see-through, the lettering on the back was weird and out of proportion. Rubin gave a disastrous press conference attempting to explain himself, but it did little to quell the outrage from players, who have lodged a complaint with their union to try to get the uniforms fixed before opening day.
The whole incident is patently ridiculous, but it also speaks to a broader problem with contemporary consumer life American life. In the past few years, consumers have bemoaned the “enshittification” of various products — a sort of stupid phrase, but a useful one nonetheless. The term was coined a few years ago by the blogger Cory Doctorow to describe the declining quality of internet platforms, but it has since been used to articulate consumers’ creeping sense that everything we pay for is getting worse, even as we pay more for everything. Shelling out $3,500 a month for a one-bedroom in a brand-new building? Your kitchen is made entirely of plastic. Have a problem with your Amazon order? It’s actually impossible to get a human person on the line to talk about it. Paying a new jacked-up fare for public transport? Be sure to check for delays. What about a cross-country flight? We’d recommend staying away from those planes that literally have screws loose.
This, consumers are crying out, is not what we signed up for. The promise of the 21st-century economy — presided over by shiny tech firms and private equity behemoths — was better stuff for less, not shittier stuff for more. We were told that technology would make everything better, that the free market would deliver a steady stream of higher-quality goods to consumers. Instead, a handful of monopolies have consolidated major consumer markets, and everything that we pay for in day-to-day life seems to gradually become the worst version of itself. The most frustrating part, at least from the consumer’s standpoint, is how intractable it all feels: Unless you’re willing to spend half your life savings on a luxury good that may last through the decade, you’re stuck paying more than you’d like for something that you’re pretty sure will break in two years.
The situation with the MLB jerseys is a particularly poignant illustration of this trend. To be fair to Rubin, some of the blame lies with Nike, who designed the jersey that Fanatics then manufactured. But the lion’s share of the blame has landed in Rubin’s lap because he is such a picture-perfect avatar of the slick, supposedly forward-looking entrepreneurial type that rules over the modern economy. In this case, he and Nike promised to deliver a modern baseball jersey that would improve comfort and performance, and they secured a lucrative corporate contract peddling that promise. Then they delivered an awful product that everyone hates.
And the worst part is that judging by his public remarks, Rubin literally doesn’t understand why people are mad at him. “We’re purely doing exactly as we’ve been told, and we’ve been told we’re doing everything exactly right, and we’re getting the shit kicked out of us. So that’s not fun,” Rubin told reporters last week. He probably really does believe this to be true: He did what he was told to do, delivered for his shareholders, padded his bottom line. But did he do what companies with a shred of self-respect actually aspire to do — namely, deliver a product that people like? The answer is as transparent as the league’s new pants.
Here’s the truth: Michael Rubin likely does not care that his jerseys look terrible. He does not care about the people who are buying them. He does not even really care about the players wearing them. And he doesn’t care for the same reason that Amazon doesn't care that your package was stolen and your landlord doesn’t care that your dishwasher has been broken since September: What are you going to do, buy an MLB jersey somewhere else?
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the future of the NCAA? “By clinging to the past, the NCAA has no future,” by Barry Svrluga in The Washington Post (March 7, 2024).
. . . why Irish sports have become a hub of pro-Palestinian activism? “An Irish Athlete on Organizing a Sports Boycott of Israel,” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (March 4, 2024).
. . . the imminent collapse of Glenn Younkin’s D.C. sports arena gambit? “Ted Leonsis’s Suburban Arena Scam Is Nearly Kaput,” by Chris Thompson in Defector (March 8, 2024).