There’s nothing like representing your favorite team by wearing a hat. I understand why, even though I don’t wear them often because finding a hat that fits my big head well and doesn’t look awkward is difficult for me. I have a few University of Georgia hats (of course), as well as one or two Atlanta Braves hats.
Baseball hats are a big business. According to market.us, the baseball cap market was worth $19 billion in 2024 and could reach as high as $35 billion by 2034. One of the biggest players in the baseball hat industry is New Era, which had $1 billion in revenue in 2022. That’s largely on the strength of its exclusive contract with Major League Baseball (MLB) for hat design and production.
Of course, the best way to ensure sales for new and repeat customers is to create new designs, and New Era has done that in spades in recent years. A lot of these new looks aren’t my cup of tea, but then again, middle-aged guys who don’t wear hats often aren’t the company’s primary demographic.
New Era recently launched a line of “Overlap” caps, which feature a team’s icon superimposed over the team name as it would look on a jersey.
This hat collection for Major League baseball this year is certainly interesting… pic.twitter.com/dL59SjQlwk
— Just Baseball (@JustBB_Media) March 10, 2025
I guess some of them look okay, but some of them wind up looking weird. The Diamondback’s A over the word Arizona makes the hat read “AriAna,” for example. The San Diego Padres hat looks like “PaSDes.” But New Era had to pull one team’s hat from circulation.
Related: MLB’s Uniform Woes Continue, but Is There Relief in Sight?
The hat for the Texas Rangers superimposes the T over the word Texas. The hat reads “TeTas.”
WHO APPROVED THIS?!?! 💀 pic.twitter.com/dxYx7Mnia6
— Rangers Nation ⚾️ (@rangers__nation) March 9, 2025
There’s one massive problem with that: tetas is vulgar Spanish slang for… umm… a part of the female anatomy. (Just say it out loud, and I think you’ll understand.)
“The Texas Rangers’ Overlap hat went viral over the weekend when fans spotted the Spanish word the design accidentally created and the link to the hat’s product page now redirects to the Rangers shop homepage,” reports Brooks Peck at The Athletic.
A couple of the other hats are almost as questionable. The Los Angeles Angels hat reads “AnAels,” and the Houston Astros had reads “AsHos.” Yikes.
New Era took the Texas hats off the market as quickly as it could, but that hasn’t stopped the secondary market from taking advantage of the controversy. (Hooray for capitalism!)
“Well, the ‘Tetas’ hats were (naturally) pulled from the shelves as soon as the internet exploded with jokes, but it seems like some lucky fans were able to get their hands on some and are now selling them for an extreme mark up on eBay,” writes Andrew Mies at Whiskey Riff. “To be fair, I don’t know if this is real because how would they [possibly] have been shipped to you already if they only went live a day or so ago? Maybe these are employees offloading a box that ‘fell off the truck,’ and if so, well good on them.”
Mies wonders if New Era’s employees are clueless or if the company used AI to create the designs. It’s not the first time New Era had to take a hat off the market for vulgarity:
A new Las Vegas Athletics snapback hat just dropped and it’s already sold out. pic.twitter.com/qyn6w7doKf
— Las Vegas Locally 🌴 (@LasVegasLocally) September 24, 2024
Also, a few years ago, New Era created a series of “Local Market” hats that were so ugly and became the subject of so much internet ridicule that the company took them off the market the same day they launched.
Seriously, y’all, either New Era is trying to see how far it can push the envelope and get away with it, or the company has a bunch of clueless graphic designers. You be the judge.
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