Patch…Add-em?

In every NY Sports section or blog there’s tons of drama and back-and-forth going on about the Inaugural Season hats: should they have added a patch or not, to the side of the hat or the back, and why is it so big? These questions circulate and circulate, building pressure against or for the hats. From my own unscientific browsing of blog comments the overwhelming consensus is  ”wtf, why?!”

But rather than explain my opinion on the hats I’d much rather explore the circumstances which manifested the controversial piece of apparel. I do deal with marketing types everyday as a Graphic Designer.

So let’s first consider this from a marketing perspective. In this hypothetical situation you’re on a marketing team for the Yankees (wearing a mighty fine suit btw), and you get the sales numbers from accounting and notice a large spike in hat sales. That must have been why you got that fat raise.

As an astute marketer you delve deep into the figures and see what hats sold the best—ah-ha the All-Star Game hats. That certainly makes sense. Well you have to build on last years sales (if you expect another fat raise). Again looking at the numbers you conclude that since more people buy hats than jerseys, you will push for the Yankees product design team to put together an inaugural season hat worthy of hype and customers hard-earned dollars.

The idea is shipped off to the design team…

So now you’re a designer and you have to create another best-selling hat. People already overwhelmingly prefer your patch to that Dominos Pizza look-alike the Mets did, so you’re riding high. You have to out-do them again. They’ll probably do a left-side patch and play it safe after the non-traditional uniform patch backfired.

You deduce that the Yankees have to do this thing big, and then it hits you: why not put the patch on the back of the hat? It will have a greater balance with the front without having a random thing stuck on the side, so yeah, you’ll incorporate it into the back of the hat; front and back just like that.

You think you’re really on to something: if people choose to wear it flipped backwards a-la Griffey Jr. in his heyday, it will still advertise the Yankees, and hell, on TV you mostly see the backs of the players heads, more free advertising for the hat—and your design.

So into design you go, and then you realize you have to deal with the MLB logo…”damn!” you think to yourself, that logo has to be there, and at the standard size too or MLB will come down hard on you. The Yankees are your priority though, so they have to be larger and more important-looking than the MLB logo. When you’re done, the final patch looks pretty big for a back-of-the-hat, but then you rationalize it again because some people will wear it backwards. “DONE!” you proclaim, and schedule a meeting with marketing.

In the meeting you explain how this has never been done before, it’s constant product advertisement, and the dual-use angle as well. Marketing is sold! Into production it goes…

So there we have it, my guess at how the hat came to be.

My opinion about them: well, I don’t mind them, in fact I’m bordering on liking them, and once you see them on the field, you might like them too—as long as the team wearing them is winning.

- Joe G.