Photo mixups happen, but there are a whole lot of them raging around newly-signed Chicago Cubs’ pitcher Shōta Imanaga. While it’s not the biggest mistake in this situation, the largest platform involved to mess something up here was Major League Baseball itself, which tweeted an incredibly awful photoshopped image of Imanaga in a Cubs’ jersey Thursday. And they took a lot of flak for that:
Graphic design is MLB's passion. https://t.co/Nohc8wOot1
— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra) January 11, 2024
1. The photoshop. 2. The intern’s example of work to get the Photoshop gig with MLB. pic.twitter.com/kgn3k5NFWh
— Dustin Gouker (@DustinGouker) January 11, 2024
Terrific Photoshop job, here. Nice use of every with of pinstripe ever invented. https://t.co/oyYaGBIHFx
— Pointless Exercise (@desipiodotcom) January 11, 2024
Surely the graphics department of a $10B sports league can do a better job at Photoshop https://t.co/kjG9kixT97
— Scluse (@Scluse_) January 11, 2024
the dodgers spend a billion dollars in one offseason and mlb can only afford to pay for a bottom-tier fiverr jersey edit https://t.co/Tvuri55rQc
— Jared (@j_puck4) January 11, 2024
They’re letting babies photoshop now!
— Not Jake 🥷🏻 (@CincyHub) January 11, 2024
However, while that is an egregious graphic with a wide variety of pinstripe widths and directions, as well as uniform shades, at least @MLB used an image of the proper Japanese pitcher. On Wednesday, both ESPN 1000 and Baseball America ran images of Shōta Takeda, a different Japanese pitcher who remains in that country (and is also right-handed rather than left-handed). The ESPN 1000 tweet was deleted, but AA’s Matt Clapp noted it at the time. The Baseball America tweet was also deleted, but was screengrabbed by Nick Pfeiffer:
That's the wrong Japanese pitcher named Shota. https://t.co/7E1JdnYots
— Matt Clapp (@TheBlogfines) January 10, 2024
Baseball America did this yesterday too. Just a bad look all around pic.twitter.com/sKYFbySDYm
— Nick Pfeiffer (@nickpfeiffer92) January 10, 2024
Photo mistakes happen, including from us. And some of them are about players being mislabeled in image databases; we don’t know that that’s the case here, but it has happened numerous times. But it is remarkable to see so many of them around Imanaga, from bad Photoshops to outright misidentifications (and misidentifications with a pitcher using the other hand, no less).
[MLB on Twitter/X]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.