Ribs have been in the headlines this week, but sadly, not as part of a review of exciting new ballpark barbecue offerings. On Monday, Triston Casas was diagnosed with a fractured rib on his left side, an injury that will result in a prolonged absence and comes at a time when the Red Sox infield has already been depleted. On Wednesday, the Cubs’ Cody Bellinger was diagnosed with fractured ribs on his right side, interrupting his rebound from a slow start.
The 24-year-old Casas left Saturday’s game against the Pirates after injuring himself while fouling off a Mitch Keller pitch. He was initially diagnosed with a strain in his left rib cage and was placed on the injured list on Sunday. An MRI taken on Monday revealed a fracture as well, and the presumption is that his absence will be a long one given that the damage involves muscle and cartilage as well as bone. “Timetable, there’s none. It has to heal on its own. We’ve just got to be patient,” said manager Alex Cora. That sounds like a trip to the 60-day IL could be in order. Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday night, the Orioles beat the Angels to vault into a tie for first place in the AL East at 16-8. That tie was short-lived; the Yankees beat the A’s a few hours later to reclaim first for themselves. Meanwhile, the Red Sox beat the Guardians to move to 14-11, the last-place Rays beat the Tigers to get back to .500, and the Blue Jays lost a squeaker to the Royals. It was a good day for the AL East, but what else is new?
Through 93 games of non-divisional play, the AL East teams have accumulated a 57-36 record, a .613 winning percentage. That would be a 99-win pace across a 162-game schedule. They’re tearing the league to shreds. That led me to wonder: Just how good is this start, and what happened to the previous divisions to start this hot?
To solve this problem, I decided to look back through history for inter-divisional records from across the league, because by definition intra-divisional records work out to .500. I started in 1998, the first year with 30 teams, and went from there. But that’s not sufficient, of course. If the East keeps this record up throughout the year, it will end up with the best winning percentage of the 30-team era. But its teams probably won’t keep the pace up. It’s a lot easier to post a .600 winning percentage over 93 games than over the 550 they’ll rack up by season’s end. The best full-season non-divisional winning percentage over that time was .595 by the AL West in 2001, and the Mariners tying the single-season wins record had a lot to do with that.
To account for that, you have to stop your count earlier in the season. Through the same date last year, for example, the AL East had played 81 non-divisional games. Outrageously, its teams had won 57 of those as well, a .704 winning percentage that’s the best, through games of April 24, of any division over this time frame.
Using the exact day isn’t perfect either, though. Through April 24 of 2004, AL East teams had played 18 non-divisional games thanks to a late start to the season. In 1998, they’d already played 95. Still, that provides us an interesting initial benchmark. The .613 clip that the division is currently playing at is a 93rd-percentile outcome, 11th-best over the last 26 years (I’ve excluded 2020 from this analysis for obvious reasons). Read the rest of this entry »
In the first at-bat of Monday’s game between the Yankees and the A’s, Carlos Rodón fooled Esteury Ruiz with a back foot slider. Ruiz tried to check his swing, and the ball actually hit him in the back foot. It was very much a borderline call, and first base umpire John Tumpane ruled that Ruiz held up and should therefore be awarded first base. Naturally, umpire antagonist extraordinaire Aaron Boone started complaining about the call and quickly earned a warning. Enjoyably for everyone involved, the television broadcast picked up the warning perfectly. “Hey, guess what,” shouted home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt. “You’re not yelling at me. I did what I was supposed to do and checked. I’m looking for him to get hit by the pitch. You got anything else to say, you’re gone. OK?” A chastened Boone raised his hand to signal that he understood. Moments later, he became the first manager in the history of the game to be ejected while examining his fingernails.
What happened, of course, is that a fan seated in the front row directly behind Boone yelled at Wendelstedt, who mistook the voice for Boone’s. Wendelstedt’s refusal to listen to either Boone or the many other people who tried to explain that the voice hadn’t come from the Yankee dugout at all is its own issue. So too is his farfetched post-game contention that he was reacting to a different voice entirely: “I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.” One of the last things Boone said before leaving the field was, “You guys are in trouble for this.” I suspect that he’s wrong, and for the same reason that Wendelstedt felt comfortable telling reporters a tale that could so easily be proven wrong: Umpires are rarely held accountable for these kinds of mistakes (at least not publicly). However, none of that is our topic for today. Our topic is something much more specific. I have a suspicion as to why Wendelstedt was instantly certain that Boone was the one who shouted. It’s not just that the fan shouted; it’s what he shouted.
Over seven years of watching Aaron Boone yelling at umpires, two things have always stood out to me. The first is that Aaron Boone loves to address the umpires by name. On Monday, the kerfuffle started when Boone yelled to Tumpane, “Hey! It’s a full swing, John!” Toward the end of the ordeal, he told Wendelstedt, “I’m not leaving, Hunter.” Here’s the thing about humans: Unless we’re either greeting someone, trying to get someone’s attention, or specifying which person we’re speaking to, we don’t actually say each other’s names very often. If you’re simply using someone’s name to get their attention, you put it at the front of the sentence, in order to make sure they hear the rest of what you say. Boone doesn’t do that nearly as often. He puts the umpire’s name at the end of the sentence, which is something you do in order to add more emphasis. If you watch footage of his ejections, you’ll hear him shout, “Bear down, Brennan,” at Brennan Miller, “Where’s that pitch, Sean?” to Sean Barber, “Jeez Lance,” to Lance Barrett, and plentymore. Maybe it comes from the fact that Boone has spent his entire life around the game and knows absolutely everyone. Or maybe at some point he took a Dale Carnegie class and learned that the sweetest thing a person can hear is the sound of their own name. Maybe this is just how he thinks schmoozing works. I removed curse words from some of these quotes, but the point remains. Boone loves to remind the umpires of their own names.
The second thing I’ve noticed is more important to my theory. Like any true coach, Boone is a teacher. He doesn’t just complain about the umpire’s calls. He couches his complaints as constructive criticism. He implores them to get better and he tells them that it’s not too late to improve. Not two weeks ago he told umpire John Bacon, “Come on, John. You’re better than that.” Boone employs classic coach-speak, telling them to get it together, to clean it up, to bear down; all of those vague, unhelpful bromides your high school coach used to hurl at you rather than offering actionable advice. “I need you to get better,” he’ll yell.
This is an innovative approach, especially when the target for all of this encouragement is an umpire. By berating the umpires under the guise of offering friendly advice, Boone has somehow found a way to be passive aggressive while shouting at the top of his lungs. It’s borderline gaslighting and it honestly might be a scientific breakthrough: caring so loudly that the object of your affection has you removed from the premises. Boone has literally gotten ejected for telling an umpire, “I’m just trying to help you.” He then got suspended for screaming at the same umpire from such close range that he ended up spitting on him, an action that is not traditionally considered helpful. I can’t tell if Boone saves this coach-speak specifically for umpires, or whether he’s been around the game so long that this is just how he speaks to everyone all day long. I can absolutely see him growing more and more exasperated as he waits for his coffee during the morning rush at Dunkin’ Donuts, then finally striding over and telling the poor kid behind the counter, “I need you to bear down, Derek. Right now.”
Like many motivators, Boone has a go-to rallying cry, a phrase intended to fire up his charges. That phrase is Let’s go, and as you might have noticed, he’s not alone in that. Let’s go is having a moment. Although it has been around for centuries, its status as a catch-all exclamation has grown explosively over the last few years. Luke Winkie documented the phenomenon for Slate back in June:
Clearly Let’s go has become a hinge point for the male vocabulary, a shortcut for all intragender communication. The term is utilitarian, flexible, and fundamentally meaningless; it’s another way to say, “Yes, a thing exists.” I first started noticing its encroachment about three years ago, when suddenly every sentence that came out of my mouth seemed to be punctuated in the exact same way. Did I engineer a deft maneuver in a board game? Let’s go. Did my girlfriend and I settle on a takeout order? Let’s go. Does the bloodwork look good? Let’s go.
As in the examples above, Let’s go is usually reserved for happy moments. That’s even more true in the realm of baseball. It’s the kind of thing you’re likely to see Sarah Langs, a beacon of baseball joy if there ever was one, tweeting to mark the occasion of the first game of the season.
But in keeping with the cynicism of his attempts to help the umpires become the best versions of themselves both on and off the field, Boone charges up this positive colloquialism with all the negative energy he can muster. He’s not the only coach to say this phrase, but he says it way more than anybody else. At this point, Let’s go (with or without the adornment of an f-bomb) is basically Aaron Boone’s catchphrase, especially when it comes to umpires. It didn’t take me long to assemble the clips below.
Knowing all this, take a moment to put yourself in the Hunter Wendelstedt’s extremely inflexible shoes. It’s Monday afternoon. You’re approximately eight seconds into the game and Aaron Boone is already chirping, because apparently the wood sage and sea salt aromatherapy candles in the Yankees clubhouse have not succeeded in calming him down even a little bit. Mere seconds after administering a warning, you hear a shout coming from the exact same spot. The fan’s voice wasn’t picked up by television microphones, but according to the lipreading of Jomboy, what he shouted was, “Let’s go, home plate!” (I’m not 100% convinced that’s what he said; he might have just shouted Go or, Yo, but both of those options are close enough that they could easily be confused for Let’s go.) As for the second part, addressing the home plate umpire as Home Plate is hilariously dumb. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, spoken by the character Debbie Fogle. “I’ve never even had a nickname,” she says. Then she reconsiders, “I mean, I guess people do call me ‘Hey Lady.’”
So the fan shouted two things: One of them was absolutely something Boone would say, and the other was something Boone would never say. On the one hand, if there’s one thing Wendelstedt knows, it’s that Aaron Boone knows his name. Boone is more likely to address an umpire by their first, middle, and last names like a parent grounding their kid for cursing — “Harry Hunter Wendelstedt, I am very disappointed in you.” — than he is to address the home plate umpire as Home Plate. If he’d stopped to think about it, Wendelstedt would’ve realized that no one in the ballpark was less likely than Boone to address him by his position rather than his first name.
On the other hand, before he heard, “Home plate,” he heard Boone’s catchphrase. No wonder he thought it was him. And Wendelstedt isn’t exactly a stop-and-think-about-it kind of guy. He started winding up to toss Boone before the butthead in the front row got to the T in Plate, and he refused to let anything he learned over the next few hours change his mind. Besides, over his decades as an umpire, I’m sure Wendelstedt has been called Home Plate enough times that it’s basically his version of Hey Lady.
So that’s my theory. Boone got ejected because the fan yelled exactly the right thing to make the umpire think it was the manager. By having a catchphrase, Boone has made himself very easy to impersonate. Even if you call the umpire something the real manager would never call them — Home Plate; or Blue; or Hey Umpire Guy; or Excuse me, Mister Moustache Man — as long as you throw in a Let’s go (and maybe some profanity for good measure), you’re basically Aaron Boone.
Mike Trout decided he was going to be more aggressive on the bases this year. Last season, Trout lamented that he missed the days when he was a true stolen base threat. It couldn’t have been easy for the former steals leader to watch the effects of the new rules play out around him. Like Mr. Incredible stuck in a dead-end office job, Trout longed for the glory days. I’d imagine that feeling was made all the more painful because he knew deep down that he still had the skills to achieve greatness.
Things are different this season. Last year, the Angels ranked last in the American League in stolen bases. This year, they rank third. They have a new manager and several new coaches. Trout is never one to spark controversy, and he hasn’t blamed any of his past managers for holding him back. Still, former Angels manager Phil Nevinmade it clear he wasn’t all that interested in his players stealing last year, while new skipper Ron Washington and first base coach Bo Porter have already spoken about their team taking a more aggressive approach on the bases. Both mentioned Trout in particular, and Trout himself has confirmed that aggressive baserunning is a bigger part of the “game plan” for 2024. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve become increasingly convinced that a lot of the subtle roster construction hacks some teams use to get the most out of their prospects — service time manipulation, extremely restrictive pitcher workload management, drafting by bonus demand rather than picking the best player available — are too cute by half. Sometimes it pays off, but in most cases, players are going to be good, or they’re not. They’re going to stay healthy, or they’re not. And fixating on the externalities is ultimately self-defeating.
Consider Jordan Walker. The St. Louis Cardinals, to their immense credit, brought Walker north from spring training last year. The no. 12 global prospect that offseason, Walker was only 20 at the time, and hadn’t had so much as a sniff at Triple-A. But he was athletic for his 6-foot-5 frame, which promised so much power the question was whether scouts could accurately report it before they ran out of pluses.
Did it matter that the Cardinals had an extremely crowded outfield at the time? No. Did it matter that if Walker lived up to his potential, he’d hit free agency at age 26? No. The only thing that mattered was whether he’d sink or swim. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday afternoon’s game between the A’s and Yankees ended in impressive fashion for Oakland, with closer Mason Miller buzz-sawing through the top of New York’s lineup to close out a 2-0 victory. The 25-year-old righty struck out Anthony Volpe, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge consecutively on 14 pitches, mixing eight four-seam fastballs — all with velocities above 100 mph — with four nasty sliders. He absolutely overpowered Judge:
Those fastballs Judge flailed at were clocked at 100.7 mph, 102.2 mph, and 102.5 mph, the last of which wasn’t quite as fast as the 103.3-mph heater Miller used to strike out Soto. Whoosh! Read the rest of this entry »
Kyle Hendricks has long been lauded as a cerebral pitcher, and for good reason. Nicknamed “The Professor,” the 34-year-old Chicago Cubs right-hander not only has an economics degree from Dartmouth College, he relies far more on guile than gas. The antithesis of your prototypical power arm, Hendricks subsists with a heater that sits in the second percentile for velocity. Moreover, he’s no spin monster in terms of breaking stuff. As he’ll readily admit, his four-pitch arsenal is sans a plus breaking ball.
His 2024 season is off to a slow start. Over five turbulent outings, Hendricks has surrendered 37 hits, including a league-worst eight round-trippers, seven walks and 28 runs across just 21 innings. Adjustments are in order, but that’s nothing new for the righty. An ability to adjust accordingly has gone a long way toward his career ledger, which coming into this year included an 84 ERA- and a 3.80 FIP, as well as stingy walk and home run rates. When push comes to shove, Hendricks has proven more than capable of outsmarting big league hitters.
Hendricks discussed his evolution as a pitcher and his overall M.O. on the mound during spring training.
———
David Laurila: How have analytics impacted your evolution as a pitcher?
Kyle Hendricks: “Analytics have changed a lot throughout my career, and I’ve had to learn a lot about them. I still don’t know a whole lot, to be honest with you. We have such a good support group behind me on the pitching side, and I rely heavily on them. I’ll go through all my work, throw my bullpens, etcetera, and they’re breaking down all the data, what everything looks like. So, the most it’s probably helped me with is consistency — consistency of pitch shapes, and action on my pitches.
“From there, I’ve always been a guy searching for a better curveball and how to spin a ball better. It definitely can help, just looking at the shape of my curveball, the spin overall, the spin efficiency. Things like that. Those have helped me put a good visual to what I’m searching for in a breaking ball.”
On Monday, Ben Clemens published an article containing a list of the hitters who are getting the most power from the fewest swings and misses. It’s a ratio of barrels to whiffs, which Ben — because of his inexhaustible capacity for alliteration — calls “whomps per whiff.”
One name that stood out to me was Jake Cronenworth, who came in seventh on the whomps per whiff leaderboard. I first encountered Cronenworth many years ago, when he was the Shohei Ohtani of the Big Ten, and have been mightily pleased to see him evolve from a seventh-round pick to a two-time All-Star, and a starting infielder on a Padres team that usually buys its infielders from the Rolls Royce dealership.
A year ago, Cronenworth singed a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in brown and gold into the 2030s, and then the wheels fell off. Read the rest of this entry »
CJ Abrams has that look this year. After showing a glimpse of his offensive potential in 2023, his skills are on full display to start the season. Abrams’ projectable frame always seemed like it could facilitate him adding power. Whether he ever got to that power was dependent on his swing mechanics.
Up until this year, the lefty had a steep, pushy entry into the hitting zone. That resulted in a suboptimal launch angle distribution. In 2023, he had a 32.6% sweet-spot rate, which was in the 30th percentile. (A player’s sweet spot percentage is defined as the percentage of their batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.) So instead of hitting balls at launch angles that would result in line drives and hard-hit fly balls, Abrams hit a ton of popups and groundballs. His swing had a limited range of quality contact points.
He may have swatted 18 home runs, but those long balls were mixed in with consistent mishits. When you swing down into the hitting zone like Abrams did last year, it can lead you to be what a lot of hitting coaches call a collision hitter. If your bat path doesn’t have much room for error, you might still run into some homers from time to time, but there is only a tight window for you to do so. Rather than your barrel moving up through the entire hitting zone, it only does so at one point in space. That might be hard to conceptualize, so let’s check out some video of Abrams last year, focusing primarily on how his hands descend when he starts his swing. Read the rest of this entry »
This all started because I was staring at Jose Siri. I don’t think I’ve ever set out with the intention of staring at Jose Siri, but it ends up happening kind of a lot. He’s very watchable. He runs like the wind, if the wind had big muscles. He swings with a righteous fury, and on the rare occasions when he connects with the baseball, he threatens to reduce it to a smoking heap of carbonized yarn. He throws hard too, but not hard enough to wax poetic about it. A few weeks ago, I was researching tromps and whomps (you know, baseball stuff) when I noticed the emblem on Siri’s jersey. It wasn’t the entire Rays logo. It was just a tiny part of it meant to symbolize the whole. Jose Siri was wearing a metonym.
I started wondering about that yellow starburst design: where it came from, what it was supposed to be, and how long I’d been staring at it without actually seeing it. Despite the bright colors, Tampa Bay’s Columbia Blue alternates are the sparsest jerseys in baseball. No other team has a jersey whose front features a graphic with no characters whatsoever. Few teams in the history of the league have worn jerseys like that, and when they did, the graphics were much more representational than the asymmetrical sunburst shape that Tampa Bay uses to evoke a ray of sunshine. Over the past few weeks, I spoke to several people with knowledge of the intersection between art, graphic design, and baseball. I was also lucky enough to speak to two of the people who created the logo in the first place. As it turns out, that piece of the logo is called “the glint,” and it was born on a rooftop in New Jersey.
I first spoke to artist Graig Kreindler. He hadn’t noticed the jerseys either, and he gamely agreed to let me send him some pictures the moment before we got on the phone so that he could give me his reaction in real time. Kreindler loved the jerseys. “I had no idea that they’d gotten rid of the type altogether,” he said. “I love that idea of having your visual identity tied around something… that in this case is pretty abstract.” Kreindler specializes in gorgeously detailed paintings of baseball players and scenes, usually from previous eras. When I asked him whether he could think of anything comparable to the Rays jerseys, he brought up the Philadelphia Athletics of the 1920s, whose jerseys had an elephant on the breast, and who were apparently forbidden from smiling.
“Anything that makes me think of something vintage,” said Kreindler, “I’m all for it.” As a painter rather than a graphic designer, he was also acutely aware of how challenging this logo must have been to come up with. “I guess it’s kind of hard to make a shape —” he started, but then he cut himself off. “How do you illustrate rays of the sun?”
It’s a good point. After all, until a ray of sunshine hits something, it’s just a line. It’s hard to make that fun enough to put on a hat or a jersey. Still, there are plenty of wrong ways to answer the question. Just ask the Hagerstown Suns, who decided to lean into their name and ended up going full-on Raisin Bran.
MLB teams don’t just pick their own logos. The league has a carefully curated aesthetic, overseen by the internal MLB Design Services team. Some clubs have been around since the 19th century, and anything new needs to be of a piece with what came before, as well as with the league’s vision for the future. And there is more new design work than you might realize. Each season, there are a million things that require branding: the All-Star Game, the World Series, spring training, each round of the playoffs, the Home Run Derby, All-Star workout day, the Futures Game. Even the Winter Meetings get a new logo every year.
Long before Tampa Bay picked just a portion of its visual identity to focus on, it did the same thing with its name. From the franchise’s 1998 debut to 2007, the Devil Rays ran the worst record in baseball and finished last in the AL East nine times. When Stu Sternberg assumed full ownership of the team in 2005, it was in need of an exorcism. Whether or not it had anything to do with complaints from religious groups, Sternberg’s top-to-bottom reinvention of the franchise included a name change. Before the 2008 season, Tampa Bay dropped the word Devil and set out to rebrand around the idea of rays of sunshine. They were no longer fish; they were photons. (The devil can be hard to renounce, though. Rather than shell out for new uniforms, the team’s Appalachian League affiliate in Princeton, West Virginia, stayed the Devil Rays for an extra year.)
That history has colored how some people view the rebrand. Sarah Ingber is an artist who worked on the Too Far From Town project at Baseball Prospectus. When she looks at the new logo, her first association is a religious one: the Star of Bethlehem. However, she readily admits that the origin of the name change left her biased. “Devil Rays are a weird team name but cool animal,” she told me. “They can’t help their little head shapes. Justice for satanic nomenclature!”
Courtesy of FanBrandz
Once the decision to cast out the devil had been made, MLB brought on FanBrandz, a sports branding agency run by Bill Frederick, to create the visual identity for the Rays. A team of four or five people worked on the project, with MLB vice president of design Anne Occi essentially acting as creative director. It was the first big project Maureen Raisch, a designer not long out of college, had worked on. “They really threw me in the deep end creatively, which was really exciting,” she said.
Raisch and Frederick explained that Sternberg, a Brooklyn native who grew up worshipping Sandy Koufax, had a very specific aesthetic in mind. “In the meetings, he really wanted the sophistication of the Yankees uniform,” said Frederick. “So that really drove the process.” The futuristic fonts and rainbow gradients of the Devil Rays were out. Navy blue was in. “Classic typography,” explained Raisch, “you want that in baseball. It’s right at home in the aesthetic of MLB.” However, she drew the line when there was talk of pinstripes. “Do not do it. You cannot,” she remembered thinking. “For God’s sake, you’re in the division with the Yankees!”
“I think that the glint came very, very late in the process,” said Frederick. “We had done quite a bit of exploration at that point.” His team had tried out concepts using sunbeams to create the leg of the R in Rays, or coming through the wordmark. “We had done some stuff that was very expressive, and it was determined that it really should become much more sophisticated.” Eventually, they hit on the winner. Said Raisch, “These classic baseball letter forms were going to be the thing. You kind of knew that.” That simpler design “needed that little special thing.” The idea for the glint arose during a meeting at MLB’s New York office in early January 2008. “We had this meeting, just up here on Park Ave,” said Raisch. “And something in this meeting sparked, where I go, “I know what we’re going to do.”
“We had played around a lot with it,” said Frederick. “And it just occurred to us at some point, and I think it was probably with Maureen. We said, ‘Well, what about what the sun does to the type?’ It actually reflects off the type, as opposed to trying to image sunbeams. And then Maureen basically took it on herself.”
Rather than simply draw a cartoon glint, Raisch preferred to work from real life. “I think it speaks to the way I approach creative work in sports,” she said. “I think everything should be kind of grounded in reality. Reality is what is familiar to the human eye, so you can’t fake it. Think of movies done with practical, in-camera effects. They’re the best, they hold up. Indiana Jones, from 1981, still looks great.”
Raisch went looking for gold lettering, the kind you’d get from a hardware store to put your street address on your front door. “So I go back home and all I could get is a [number] four. Like a mailbox, brass four.” She took it up to the roof of her Jersey City apartment and took pictures of the four catching the setting sun. “In my mind’s eye, it was more about maybe we bevel or give it a dimensionality, and you’d have this real hotspot. That was kind of the theory.”
Raisch still has the photos, which she showed to me. Wearing gloves to ward off the cold, she held the four by the base with a pair of needle-nose pliers. With a flaming sunset and shadowed Jersey City skyline as the background, the sun shines through the crook of the four, glancing off the corner and refracting into five beams of light. Another picture shows two images side by side, the glint coming off the four and the glint coming off the R in the finished Rays jersey. The two match almost perfectly.
“That’s how it was created,” said Raisch. “There’s my hand in a glove. I swear it’s my hand. That’s Jersey City also; not sunny Florida, you can tell.” The idea took off. Said Frederick, “I think it was very novel. It had a lot of energy. It was different, you know? It was special. And the team really embraced it, and we saw that aspect of the logo really gain traction very quickly after we introduced it. And the next thing you know we see it being used independently as its own graphic.”
He’s not wrong. The glint is absolutely everywhere. Glint-only hats were rolled out for spring training and batting practice in 2013. Since then, it has worked its way into every corner of the franchise. There are multiple variations of it on the team website. It’s on the mound and the outfield wall. The glint-only jerseys became the team’s spring training look in 2016 and the regular season alternates in 2022. “The jerseys themselves are awesome,” said Dan Abrams, the designer behind Athlete Logos. “I love the color combo and just having a graphic logo on the front chest like that.”
LJ Rader, the art history savant behind Art But Make It Sports, prefers the boldness of the original Devil Rays logo — after sending me a picture of Randy Arozarena in a throwback uniform, he wrote, “like, these slap so hard why would you ever not make this your branding” — but he did identify some touchstones for the glint. He first thought of it as a 21st century take on a Joan Miró star.
After chatting for a few more minutes, he sent an image of Edvard Munch’s “The Sun.” It was a picture he had taken at the recent Munch exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. That brought him to an ironic point about the heliocentric rebrand: The Rays play in Tropicana Field, arguably the gloomiest place in baseball.
Courtesy of LJ Rader
Tampa Bay is well aware that some people adore its original Devil Rays look. This year, clubs were limited to four sets of uniforms. Rather than lose the glint or the throwbacks, the team jettisoned its road grays. (This proved wise, as it turns out that when exposed to so much as one drop of sweat, the new road grays take on the appearance of a drowned moth.) Predictably, some people are bothered by that decision. Chris Creamer, the founder and editor of SportsLogos.net, wants the team to pick a lane, rather than staying beholden to both its old and new identities. “If you are going to lean into the glint as the primary image of your brand, jump in with both feet,” he said. “Go with a yellow uniform. If this team is named after sun rays, the sun is yellow; let’s go yellow. Let’s really have fun with this.”
Still, the focus on the glint has only grown over time. Amazingly, the team didn’t alter the glint whatsoever when it decided to make it the focal point. When the glint is on its own, said Luke Hooper, who has designed many of the graphics here at FanGraphs, “you really notice how strange it is.” It would have been reasonable to rework it, given its new, more prominent role. But it still has the exact same dimensions, the little curve in the middle surrounded by all those sharp angles. The strangeness that gives it character really shines through.
Neither Frederick nor Raisch had any idea that the team would come to focus on the glint. “No,” said Raisch. “Absolutely delighted. I think they make foam glints. I think there are people with tattoos, if you want to Google this. I know during the playoffs, I found a guy with it shaved into the side of his head.” Said Frederick, “We didn’t know it was going to take on a life of its own to that degree. It was fun to watch, because all of a sudden, they really embraced it and started using it all over the place: in front of the stadium, in the entrance, and in the outfield cutting it in the grass. It was just turning up all over the place. It was really fun. They were able to find the most fun aspect of the identity.”
At this point, FanBrandz has worked on 28 All-Star Games and more than 15 World Series. Raisch spent 14 seasons designing for MLB and the NHL. In 2019, she left to become a senior designer for the NFL. In 2022, she became creative director for the National Women’s Soccer League, entrusted with shaping the aesthetic of the young league the same way Anne Occi did for MLB. “We’re creating an ethos at this league,” she said. “The Tampa Bay Rays glint is older than this league. And if you’re a 10-year-old league… you can actually really do different things that an NFL and a Major League Baseball, over 100-year-old brands, can’t do.”
The last thing I asked Raisch was whether she would go back and change anything about her work for the Rays if she could. She didn’t miss a beat, jumping into an idea she’d had for working the glint into the hats. Just as quickly, she caught herself, and relayed something she heard from a designer who worked on the NWSL’s new championship trophy: “There’s a fine line between simple and elegant, simple and classy, and simple and bland.” She went on, “So no, we wouldn’t do more with that. That is what makes a major league franchise feel on the level of a major league. They’re simple, they’re elegant, they’re poignant. They’re not overdone. So putting the glint there, I just corrected my 22-year-old wannabe thing that I would have wanted to do. Because it would have been too much on a TV. It would have junked it up.”
The Rays rebrand remains special to Raisch. She even wears their gear around New York City, occasionally drawing the ire of hometown fans. “I’ve had Yankee fans get nasty with me,” she said. Then she laughed. “And I’m like, ‘But do you like the glint though?’”
