I love how the 2023 baseball season has barely started, and regardless of the fact that the Mets obliterated payroll records, they still can’t escape being the Mets:
- Newly re-signed closer Edwin Diaz out for the season with injury incurred during the World Baseball Classic, still getting paid $19.5M
- Justin Verlander, who will make $43.3M this season, already on the disabled list with a teres-major injury
- Robinson Cano, who was released by the Mets in 2022, and is currently unemployed, will still make $20M from the Mets
But as the Mets have demonstrated, all that shit’s just money, and they don’t seem to care how much of it they burn if they think its going to lead to moar winz. The Diaz money is covered by insurance, Verlander will probably still have the best games of his season against the Braves, and well, Cano is a sunk cost that deferred money guys always seem to slip under the cracks unless it’s Bobby Bonilla (also the Mets’ problem lol).
However, this new jersey patch to commemorate the union between the Mets and New York Presbyterian Hospital? Now that’s some tragic shit, that I can’t believe for a second will actually make it through the entire season.
When it comes to fans roasting their own team, few are as more savage and creatively funny as Mets fans, and despite being division rivals to the Braves, I have always gotten along well with Mets fans on the internet and I respect their candor and creativity when it comes to slamming on their own teams. And from what I’ve already seen, I can’t really top or better a lot of the shit I’ve seen them dumping on the team for the absurdly ridiculous size of this patch.
But at this mammoth size, I have to imagine that it’s going to be capable of affecting player performance, just because of the general feel and added weight it’s going to add to the sleeve. Like, when a poorly screen printed t-shirt’s design feels hard on your skin instead of the softness of a cotton shirt underneath; it doesn’t absorb sweat and makes you feel wet flesh on a hot day, little things that can make you feel uncomfortable.
And as neurotic and superstitious as baseball players are, little things that affect the touch and feel of their baseball uniforms, yeah I think it’s completely plausible that these gigantic fucking patches would have the capability to affect player performance. Being on the left sleeve, I imagine a lefty hitter like Brandon Nimmo is going to feel the subtle weight of it when he gets into his batting stance, and it’s going to take a minute for him to get used to it, but any abject performance that occurs in that minute could be the difference in a winning and losing a game, and considering the Mets lost the division to the Braves by just one game, all wins do matter.
Maybe a player on defense will be uncomfortable with there being this bigass stiff square on their arm instead of the light neutrality of no patch, and it fucks up their timing and they start committing errors. Or knowing the luck of the Mets, somehow, the patch is going to come into play for an injury stint for one of their $40M pitchers.
Either way, the likelihood of such coming into play isn’t very high, because if players can adjust to all this pitch clock bullshit, the death of the shift and limited pickoff attempts, they’ll get used to a patch, even if it is the size of a Domino’s Pizza box. But if it did, it wouldn’t be surprising, because only the Mets could be the team that gets derailed by something as silly as an oversized sponsorship sleeve patch.
