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Uni Watch

Fiesta Latina

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By John Ekdahl

The Mets wore “Los Mets” jerseys last night during Fiesta Latina Night at Citi Field. The public address annoucements were done in spanish by Veronica Contreras of Telemundo and Mariachi Bustamante performed before the game.

There seems to be two schools of thought on these types of promotions. Some view it as shameless pandering and others believe it to be smart marketing. I generally don’t mind these types of one-time uniform events, especially in baseball’s 162 game schedule. For an alternate jersey, the Mets looked pretty sharp. Usually when the Mets go with these jerseys, they simply add a small “Los” above the script. This time they decided to put “Los” in front of the Mets script, which had the odd visual effect of shrinking the script to one side of the jersey. They’re certainly better than the black jerseys, though.

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Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field is getting a Caped Crusader makeover. The field will be used in the upcoming movie The Dark Knight Rises. Any Steelers fans (or should I say Gotham Rogues fans) who are interested in being an extra should check this out.

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Ohio State wasn’t too pleased to see several freshmen football players wear “JT” wristbands to a news conference on Wednesday night to show their support to Jim Tressel. OSU was apparently worried the NCAA would drop the hammer on them because “the players had not run the wristbands by Ohio State’s NCAA compliance office”.

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Benchies Header

Benchies

by Rick Pearson

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Sometimes a guy has absolutely NO use for a wingman…

8-6-11 d-mookie mono RED

And here’s the full-size version.

 
  
 
Comments (59)

    So when is French fan night and some Le Mets jerseys? Or German fan night and Das Mets? (or is it Die Mets?) Or Italian or Japanese or…whatever?

    I mean, what’s so special about hispanic culture compared to all of the other cultures that make up our melting pot of a country?

    @The: A guy with a definite article for a first name should need no correction, but in languages like French and German the word for “the” changes according to quantity or gender.

    So a French jersey would have to read “Les Mets” (not to be confused with “the less Mets the better”). In German, “das” is singular (and neuter — insert your own joke here). The plural masculine article is “dem.” As in “Dem Mets.”

    So Brooklyn Dodger fans were on to something when they called their team “Dem Bums.”

    There was talk about the Toronto Blue Jays playing some games in Montreal. If they did, I think it’d be kind of neat if they were to wear jerseys with “Les Geais Bleus” on them.

    Forgive me, I took only maybe 3 months of French in 7th grade and 1 year of German in 9th and that was around 15 years ago… so I’ve kinda forgotten/never really learned it. I do remember really hating the whole gender thing though.

    Lloyd: re “In German, “das” is singular (and neuter – insert your own joke here). The plural masculine article is “dem.” Actually the plural for articles “der” (masculine) and “das” (neuter) is “DIE”. The “dem” you refer to is the dative case, not the nominative.

    Seems the last thing we need is to encourage even LESS assimilation into American culture.

    Word, it’s a real shame they added that goddamn chorizo to the sausage races in Milwaukee.

    Should just scrap the whole thing and have a race between a loaf of white bread and a slice of American cheese.

    And unionjack, you should change your handle to starsandstripes. The Revolution was more than 200 years ago.

    Do Hispanic fans get in free? Half price?

    Don’t tell me Los Mets are the only ones who profit from this deal?

    Really outdated mindset, I know, but it seems to me that if I decide to move to France I probably ought to plan on learning to speak (or at least read) some French.

    Or, I suppose I could expect all the signs to be in English, too. That’s clearly more in line with 21st century thinking.

    Really need to keep pace with the world, don’t I.

    Don’t look at me, man. Where I live, the street signs are bilingual – English and Greek!

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    Even so, I’ve lived in Greektown 14 years and still don’t know whether that cross street is pronounced “goff” or “guff.” But thanks to that phi at the end, I know it’s not “gow.”

    But hey, at least if you go to Tokyo, unlike New York, you’ll be able to read the baseball jerseys. If it’s good enough for Sadaharu. . .

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    I don’t think I’ve seen it noted yet, but the Twins wore their M hats last night (which I think are technically an alternate, but I haven’t seen them worn since the road unis were redone start of last season). They are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ’91 World Series Championship this weekend. I would presume they will wear them tonight and tomorrow as well. The odd thing is they are still sticking to the ’61 throwback jerseys vs resurrecting a ’91 throwback jersey. We’ll see if that changes the rest of the weekend.

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    Wearing an M instead of a TC with no other change is so subtle as to go unnoticed by everyone but us.

    So I suggest they put away the M caps for good and break out the old M stirrups….force everyone to show them. That would be noticeable.

    Whether its Los Mets, Lets Mets or Les Miserables, these are the best looking Mets alts they’ve ever donned. The design is so clean, so simple, so obvious, its hard to believe it took them so long to execute (then again, these are the Mets, so maybe its not so hard to believe).

    For those of us who took their on-line new uni survey last year and wondered what it all meant, maybe this is the first tangible result.

    I agree, when I saw those blue jerseys with the orange numbers last night they instantly became my #1 alternate choice. Just beautiful. Toss the black or keep it as a road alt if you must, and use something like this (with the regular script obviously) as the preferred alt at home.

    Speaking of Mets unis, it was interesting the other night to hear Keith Hernandez talk of the late-80s road uni with the script “New York” as the worst-looking uni he ever had to wear. He said he pleaded with the management to change it back to some sort of block lettering that year, but no dice. While he was saying this the director found a guy in the crowd wearing the exact jersey being discussed – great job.

    I guess Kieth was successful, since the only wore the script “New York” for the ’87 season. They went with simple block lettering on the roads (even as they transitioned back from pullovers to button-downs in ’91)for five seasons, ’88 to ’93. then, of course, spent the 93-94 seasons wearing the underlined script “New York” on the road, before finally returning to their traditional road font.

    When I first turned the game on after Jeopardy ended (college championship gives me a uni-reason to watch, but don’t think I’m patronizing that kids week crap), I thought “Holy crap they look worse than normal.” But after an inning or two, a couple of Braves runs, and masterful pitching from Huddy they grew on me. I mean they’re still Les Losers, but it is better than the black as was mentioned above.

    Also considering the night David Wright had at the hot corner defensively, I’d think there would be a better picture of him up top there.

    Interesting… why the Blacktigers have orange helmets, I don’t know… but it’s nice to see American Football being spread around the world.

    Agree, the Punjab logo is very nice! Makes a fantastic helmet decal. Reminds me of the first Ravens decal and how nicely that worked with their helmets.

    I don’t really care what the jerseys said. Given the fact that the jerseys had NO BLACK WHATSOEVER, they’re winners in my book. Maybe this is a positive sign of things to come…

    That was the first thing I noticed: NO BLACK. Blue jersey, orange lettering, white outline, orange piping. Please, please, please, please, please let this be a sign of things to come…

    Would be nice if “adding a little (or a lot of) black” stopped being seen as the way to make any uniform better, yes.

    It’s done, as many things in major league baseball are done, poorly.

    having the article stitched onto the jersey makes no sense at all. Los Pericos de Puebla in the Mexican League don’t have “Los Pericos” written on their chests; it just says “Pericos”. (If Puebla was to do a Tribute to Our Anglo Neighbors night, they’d surely wear jerseys that said “Parrots”, not “The Parrots”.) Using the article is just cheap: it’s like the politician in that old Bob Dylan song, eating chitlins to prove he’s One With The People.

    There’s a long-established list of team name equivalencies used by the Spanish language media. Some of the teams use them in this promotion, like the Cerveceros. I’ve seen the Angels referred to as Serafines and Angelinos. The Cubs are Cachorros.

    There is no equivalency for Mets. “Mets” in Spanish is “Mets”. Wearing a jersey that says “Los Mets” is as stupid as switching their regular jersey lettering to “The Mets”. If they wanted to do anything, they should have worn jerseys that said “Nueva York”.

    I don’t pay attention to these things — when the Padres do their Hispanic Heritage Jersey, does it say “Los Padres”, to indicate that for the purposes of that particular game, the fans should be thinking of the team name in Spanish? Because that would be really dumb.

    I can understand the one time aspect per season of doing something like this, obviously, a significant portion of MLB players are Hispanic. This percentage is much higher than other sports.

    What’s troubling is when the NBA follows suit and teams like the Phoenix Suns wear jerseys of this nature multiple times during the season. If teams like the Suns were to play an exhibition game in Mexico, that would make sense, but otherwise, just feels inappropriate. Ditto for other foreign languages on jerseys multiple times, I feel it sends the wrong message.

    im fairly certain los suns, which they’ve worn on more than one occasion is now being used to say “EFF YOU” to SB1070 and jan brewer

    of course, didn’t the NFL withhold a superbowl from phoenix for a few years cuz they wouldn’t acknowledge MLK day a few years ago?

    not saying any of this is right or wrong, but it’s interesting how politics and sports mix whenever arizona is involved

    Love the split lettering on that second example. You know, some baseball team should give that a try someday… Sigh.

    @Cort,

    Valid point I hadn’t thought of that. That would be like literally putting “The Mets” on a jersey. I like the idea of “Nueva York” on the Hispanic night jersey.

    They *could* go with Metropolitanos, but there’s too much chance of the gang at Majestic misspelling that.

    “Ohio State wasn’t too pleased to see several freshmen football players wear ‘JT’ wristbands to a news conference on Wednesday night”

    Did Jim Tressel die? I thought he, essentially, hit the door after lying to the NCAA.

    Well, on second thought, I guess a guy should be “honored” for something like that, shouldn’t he. Cuz, y’know, losing a job for screwing up is horrific and unusual and we need to orchestrate a little group anguish to help us handle such an unexpected and tragic development in life.

    (As I said above, I DO need to get my mind into proper 21st century thinking).

    Goa Swarm. Delhi Defenders. Warhawks… Cool logos…. Refreshing to see clean sharp linework and colors! Uniforms are where?

    The Los Mets jerseys look EXACTLY like the Ebbets Field Flannels Indianapolis Clowns jersey. Much ado about NADA!

    For that matter don’t 95% of baseball uniforms look like Los Mets? Baseball jerseys (except for the ’70’s and the Oakland A’s) are like tract houses built after World War II. Same script or arched font… Everything else the same.

    Sometimes three stripes are just three stripes…
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    …and sometimes they aren’t.

    Tell you what, though, that’s a nice looking jersey.

    Shameless ethnic pandering aside, those jerseys are gorgeous. They can be Los Mets year round if they promise not to wear black ever again.

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