Mis-Decorating Uniforms -- What's a "Mistake"?

You may have caught sight of the Washington D.C. baseball team's decorating snafu (Shown here) It seems downright wacky & nearly impossible to comprehend, right? How the hell could anyone misspell "Nationals" in our nation's capital?!?

Well, when you've been around the team sports uniform block a few times like I have, this is understandable, albeit still almost unforgivable. Then again, didn't we have a vice president of the country once who misspelled "potato" in front of a 1st grade class? (see: Quayle, "potato" with an "e")

But what separates a fixable "little snafu" from a bonafide, "Damn, gotta RE-DO all of them-type Mistake"? Ain't as easy

I remember growing up that the Harlem Globetrotters always played a team that came from Washington (The Generals???). That's what I first thought off when I saw the spelling error for the Nationals. (Probably not a good thing to have come to mind for any MLB team)

That is, by definition a "Mistake" of the Magna Order (or something really serious). But what if it was a Little League team's t-shirts that were paid for by a sponsor?

My personal screw-up of this variety involved a prison. That would be Folsom Prison, of Johnny Cash song fame. And a small town in California, or section of a bigger town, still not sure, named Fulsom.

As you might expect, the folks in that town (or section) are VERY sensitive about being confused with the prison of a similar name. Suffice to say, when I delivered a 100 or so t-shirts for the parents to the TOWN with the name of the PRISON, they were none to happy. That was a RE-DO type thing.

But what if PLAYER's NAME is misspelled. Most folks would think, of course, that a re-do, too. But the piss of it is that, to completely re-do the jersey (and shooting shirt in basketball) rather than just fix the NAME, is insanely expensive. With all the set-ups that are inherently involved, it's gonna cost a company about the same price as getting --almost -- a whole new team's worth of jerseys. YIKES!

That's a big "no can do re-do". Now the proud paying parent ain't gonna be too happy with that as a resolution. (I speak from experience, fortunately few, but "heated" debates nonetheless) But it is the only rational way. They're doing amazing things with solvents these day. With a heat-sealed player name (the most common method), you can get the misspelled name off with almost 100% clarity.

And that's a good point, too. All misspellings are not the same. The tackle twill split front, full button Nationals' fiasco is SO complicated as decoration goes, that it's probably easier to just chuck it and start anew. Unless the whole team's have been misspelled.

Margins have always been tight. And mistakes are always gonna happen. It's just never absolutely black & white as to when a "Mistake" has been made. Nor is it ever gonna be easy to determine what is the one & only "best" thing to do when they do happen.

(Oh, and lastly, please forgive any spelling mistakes in this post.)



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Sports Uniform Guy
TeamSportsPlanet.com