New Era, the official hat supplier of Major League Baseball, recently released a new line called “Local Market” with city-specific designs for every team. The design featured the team logo as well as area codes and images of local landmarks and cuisine that were supposed to be representative of the state. The hats were not aesthetically pleasing though and, as a result, they were not received well at all.
In fact, the line was removed hours later after receiving a ton of backlash on social media. Even the Kansas City Royals poked fun at the design of the team’s hat in its Twitter bio.
New Era spokesman Mark Maidment said in a statement to The Associated Press that the “Local Market” collection launched in November of last year, but New Era was only made aware of design flaws when users on social media users ridiculed the hats.
“One of the design features incorporates the local area codes of the respective MLB teams,” the statement said. “It recently came to our attention that a few caps omitted a relevant area code. In light of this, we removed the collection from our website so we could review the design accuracy of all the caps. We apologize for any unintentional design mistake with regard to this collection.”
Some of the icons and area codes on the hats were also inaccurate. The Pittsburgh Pirates hat didn’t even include area codes and the Tampa Bay Rays cap omitted the 727 area code which includes Tropicana Field where the Rays play baseball. They mayor of St. Petersburg poked fun at the hats as well, calling them “New Error caps.”
The hats were never designed to be worn by the players, instead they were strictly made for retail only. The “Local Market” concept seemed okay in theory but lacked in execution. New Era should have gone back to the drawing board with this one.