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New Era released a “local market” hat for each MLB team—which is a cool idea, but some terrible execution. Its so bad, guys.
The official description sounds fine, actually.
Inspired by their home city, the Minnesota Twins Local Market 59FIFTY Fitted Cap features an embroidered Twins logo at the front panels with city-inspired elements throughout the cap and a team color MLB Batterman logo at the rear. Additional details include a gray undervisor.
That description just doesn’t do justice to the crimes against humanity you are about to witness though.
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Here is the front, which is the least ridiculous side. It has the “local” market area codes—although it excludes many that could be considered part of “Twins territory.” Still, it could be worse, our friends at Royals Review and DRays Bay realized that neither of their team hats have the area code the team plays in. Meanwhile the Cubs and White Sox hats have area codes extending all the way south to the Saint Louis Metro in downstate Illinois, yet omit several Chicago-land prefixes. I have no idea what the green bloby thing actually is, yet I assume it is supposed to be one or more of the ten thousand lakes. It looks like a kindergarten drawing of the earth though.
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On your right side, you have... something? Is this supposed to be a double-bit Paul Bunyan axe, or a tomahawk representing the local native peoples? Either one is kind of an offensive stereotype, although the latter is likely more problematic. We also get our first glimpse of one of the more absurd features.
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The cheeseburger. What even is this cheeseburger about? I assume, maybe, its supposed to be a juicy lucy? Who would know that though? It’s literally a generic cheeseburger emoji. The rest of the back isn’t awful. I wouldn’t even be mad if someone said they liked.
The piece-de-resistance, however, is the left side.
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You see, if you were to look at most team’s hat, you would notice — that World Series logo is for the last one they won. For the Twins, apparently 1991 never happened. We just gloss over the better-known of the Two series wins? Awesome.
Overall, we clearly have a product that was designed by someone who considers Minnesota “fly-over country” and apparently just googled “what is Minnesota famous for” and clicked the first listicle that popped up. It would have been silly for them to ask the team, or a local marketing agency, or a fan, or really, anyone.
I’m not going to tell you where to buy these, because I don’t want to encourage stupidity. If you must though, I’m sure you can google it.
But what do you think? Is this the worst Twins hat ever? What is the worst feature?