Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Natinal [sic] Pastime

News involving oversights in proofreading tends to make its way pretty quickly through my department at work, and someone who noticed this flub follows baseball enough to appreciate the additional angle of it happening to one of the more hapless clubs in the sport, hanging in there at 8 games under .500 as I type this. I really do think they should have retained The Expos as their name: much easier to spell. Also, they should bring back the tri-section hats and powder-blue away uniforms.

As always, the place to go for uniform-related commentary is Paul Lukas's Uni Watch blog, and along with his insight he linked back to a 2007 compendium of all-time great sports jersey typos, which is must reading. Can you spot anything wrong with Joe Carter's uniform, at left? (Ha! Bet he looks back at the early 1990s with some embarrassment.) But the gem is the early-1960s train wreck that was one road jersey for Chicago White Sox slugger Ted Kluszewski, bad enough to prompt the New York Times to engage in some creative typesetting to memorialize the incident.

In more mundane baseball news, Hey, Pirates still have a winning record! Maybe not so mundane. I think the Doumit-related news might sink these fortunes soon enough. At least they're doing better than actual pirates for the time being.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Bill Veeck misspelled Kluszewski's name on purpose to get publicity. He got a photographer to do that and eventually, the New York Times printed it.

This action really influenced newspapers around the country during that time. In their sports page whenever they need to fill space with an action shot, they would find a player with a last name on his jersey either swinging, reaching for the ball or sliding to a base. It had the boob stare effect. However, it worked only because so few teams had names on their jerseys. Eventually, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Baltimore had their names in the 60's. White Sox and Cleveland took off their names in the early 70's but put them back on, later.

8/22/2009 12:23 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home