Chattanooga Lookouts minor league baseball team pulls T-shirt for resemblance to racial slur

The Chattanooga Lookouts are making the news, not for their baseball plays but for pulling a T-shirt after it was being mocked on X, formerly known as Twitter, for its resemblance to a racial slur.

The Minor League Baseball team pulled a Nike-branded t-shirt featuring the word "Nooga," a shorthand nickname for Chattanooga, with the team's logo of two eyes replacing the oo's in the word. The vinyl design quickly caught on in social media for looking like a racial slur, prompting the team to pull that merchandise.

Comments on the X platform ranged from "Hilariously bad" to "Oh no, chattanooga this isn’t gonna work."

The Lookouts use the eye design and the word "Nooga" frequently in their merchandise. But the combination of the two didn't work, prompting one person to give design advice, "It’s a tremendous logo they just really needed to shrink them to look more like Os here lol."

The design was pulled from the Lookouts website and WTVC Channel 9 ABC news reported that an Internet Archive of the team's merchandise site still showed the design being for sale on July 23. Though the merch was pulled, others have quickly latched on to the design for their own use and can be found on numerous websites.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Why Chattanooga Lookout pulled T-shirt after social media backlash