Orioles announce t-shirt giveaways that look like they forgot they were giving away shirts

We’ve all been there in our professional lives. There’s that one project where the deadline creeps up on you and when you finally reach the point of no return, all you can do is the bare minimum with no bells and whistles and hope that nobody was hoping for much more than that. The people who design Orioles t-shirts seem to be in those shoes today.

On Thursday, the Orioles announced a couple of t-shirt giveaways. Trey Mancini gets a t-shirt giveaway on Monday, May 8 against the Nationals and Dylan Bundy gets one on Wednesday, June 21 against the Indians.

The giveaways, previously on the promotion schedule with designs unannounced, should really be a lot more exciting than they are. After all, some of the recent player-themed shirt giveaways, like the Zach Britton “Rock the Yard” shirt and the Miguel Gonzalez mariachi band shirt, have been great.

Then there’s this:

This is the design of someone who woke up on the morning of the absolute last-minute production deadline and realized they had completely forgotten about designing a t-shirt.

With the player names on the front, is there nothing at all on the back? Where is the fun in that?

The last few years have seen the Orioles get away from shirsey-type giveaways. These ones aren’t exactly shirseys since they don’t pretend to be jerseys, but about the same level of work went into them. I wish I could be more excited about Mancini and Bundy getting their own giveaways.

Are these going to prove to be the kind of gotta-have-it shirts like the one with all the pictures illustrating the Manny Machado-Jonathan Schoop handshake? I have a hard time believing that to be the case. The Mancini and Bundy names in the same script as the Orioles jersey is kind of neat, but this idea is not enough to carry a shirt design on its own.

There are two more shirt giveaways on the calendar for later in the season: August 1 and September 4. Will we see the same lack of effort put into those shirt designs?

Maybe everybody who’s still wearing around Brad Bergesen and Jason Berken giveaway shirts to Camden Yards will have an opportunity to come to these games and at least get a slightly more current Orioles player’s shirt.

Don’t worry about getting there early. All fans will receive the shirts at each game.