MLB Sells Left-Handed Roy Halladay Bobblehead, Removes It
Some things wrong with this bobblehead: Chin-strap beard. Poltergeist head. Roy Fucking Halladay is not fucking left-handed nor ambidextrous enough to throw a left-handed pitch while in the motion of a right-hander. Got it?
Earlier today, Zoo With Roy and reader Jeff noticed that a Roy Halladay bobblehead in the MLB Shop was, um, not right… for all of the reasons listed above. The item was almost immediately pulled from the league’s website and the issue was quickly addressed by the MLB PR Twitter account (as you can see, the sports news world has already broken for Memorial Day weekend):
Halladay bobble-gate: Our licensee @weareFoCo says wrong photo was used on site, lefty version was just a sample that never got made.
— MLB Public Relations (@MLB_PR) May 24, 2012
Here is the CORRECT Roy Halladay bobblehead, via @weareFoCo twitter.com/MLB_PR/status/…
— MLB Public Relations (@MLB_PR) May 24, 2012
I can add a little color here, since I used to work for MLB’s online shop. A local company, GSI Commerce, manages the day-to-day operations of the league’s website, and product buying is handled by a team from MLB Advanced Media. If purchased for sale on site, the selling vendor submits photos to a web team (comprised mostly of computer nerds who wouldn’t know a left-handed motion from a picture of a donkey screwing an elephant) to go along with their products. Usually the photos are from a sample item or a work-in-progress design. In some cases, individual products are Photoshopped off of one image (with logos and player names swapped out for each team). So the image you see is not always the actual product.
As for the poking fun at the league here… other than giving said vendor a license to produce products with team and player likenesses, MLB and its teams have little or no visibility on a per-product basis– they simply buy a product, and images are submitted by the vendor for each variation of said product. And that's how you sometimes wind up with left-handed but sort of right-handed Roy Halladay.
Carry on.