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Major League Baseball and New Era are regularly putting out hat collaborations with different designers, brands, and stars from the world of music and entertainment. The process of ideating, designing, and producing these collaborations means they’re in the work for quite some time, months or years before their release.
I say all of this because sometimes, you put in all that work on a project that you think is going to be a big hit and then, a month or two beforehand, something happens outside of your control that puts you in a real pickle. That is the case with New Era and Major League Baseball’s new collaboration with Drake’s OVO, with a line of hats featuring the OVO owl on the side — including not one but two Los Angeles Dodgers hats.
Drake’s OVO brand dropped a New Era collab of MLB caps pic.twitter.com/AvJIivH5pJ
— MLB (@MLB) August 1, 2024
As you have likely heard, Drake is not exactly a beloved figure in Los Angeles at the moment, as his beef with Kendrick Lamar quite literally united the city against him and led to Lamar’s “Not Like Us” becoming an instant-classic L.A. anthem and the song of the summer — not just in L.A.
As such, I have a very hard time coming up with a worse-timed collaboration than a line of Drake-themed Dodgers hats. I’m sure there will be plenty of Drake fans that purchase the hats of other teams, especially the two Blue Jays hats, but I truly cannot imagine anyone earnestly buying one of the Dodgers hats — although, I could see people buying them ironically, so maybe that’ll work out for them.
