No one is complaining about the players using their nicknames instead of surnames or that the custom cleats are distracting. The bigger issue seems to be that MLB isn’t quite sure who it wants Players Weekend to benefit.
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Baseball players gave the league a near-perfect premise to spice up three games out of the 162 each club plays and MLB couldn’t get out of its own way to make it happen. Instead it tried to legislate fun, hoping squeeze a profit from it via a few extra jersey sales.
As long as that’s the case all future Players Weekends will feel as stale as this year’s does.
Source: Blake Schuster, Yahoo! Sports
The Dodgers disliked the Players’ Weekend mandate so much that they asked MLB for permission to have both teams wear their traditional uniforms for at least one of the three games, according to Yahoo Sports. Yankees Manager Aaron Boone pointed out that, if there was an exception to be found for this rule, it was for the nationally televised game between the teams Sunday night. The weekend would be over by then anyway, as anyone who works at 9 a.m. Monday will tell you. Boone was even more diplomatic than his peers, simply saying the jerseys didn’t come on “necessarily the best weekend for us.”