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New Era appears to pull bizarre 'Local Market' caps after widespread mockery on MLB Twitter

jack baer
Staff writer
·4 min read
9

May 25 may go down as a special day on MLB Twitter. It was the day that the group successfully clowned a product line to death.

The ill-fated product line in question was the "Local Market" collection from New Era, the official cap supplier of MLB. The company has created quite a number of caps over the years — some good, some not so good — but it was hard to remember any of them immediately sparking such a measure of mockery, indignation and bafflement.

Simply put, the caps were a mess. They were such a mess that it was hard to imagine any New Era employee thinking they weren't a mess; the mess felt like the intended feature of the group of 30 hats.

The overarching theme was basically area codes and clip art. Most (but not all!) caps featured anywhere between one and nine telephone area codes on the front, with some perplexing omissions (the Tampa Bay Rays hat didn't feature the area code of their actual stadium).

Elsewhere and all over were a collection of random images stitched onto the hats. Think local flags, notable landmarks, local delicacies, World Series logos, the actual state and, in the case of the Atlanta Braves, a UFO.

Here's a taste:

The hats were so bizarre that the Kansas City Royals changed their Twitter bio to reflect their apparent interests.

Like all good things, however, it wasn't to last. Hours after the hats started making the rounds on Twitter, the collection disappeared from New Era's site, and there doesn't appear to be any other way to purchase them.

Maybe the hats will reappear some day, either as is or heavily revamped, or maybe whichever ones have been made will just sit in a New Era warehouse until the sun consumes the earth. In the meantime, here's what the internet had to say about New Era's fashion statement:

And, of course, some people just had to make their own caps:

Better luck next time, New Era.

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