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:
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
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
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:
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]