Astros’ bizarre new NSFW hat is pulled from shelves after hilarious oversight

What in the world was New Era thinking? After last year's incident involving the Athletics cap spelling out the off-color use of the word for derrière, one would think that the official hat maker of Major League Baseball would've learned their lesson. But New Era found a new way to bungle their latest release, and this time, the Houston Astros were the victims.

New Era's latest design features team logos superimposed over the name of the ball club. While some of these designs are mildly intriguing, most were a horrific mishmash of letters jumbled together that looked more like a game of Scrabble rather than an actual hat.

But it got worse. Three teams had their hats pulled after fans complained (and rightfully so). Why? Because the unfortunate collaboration of letters happened to spell out some rather inappropriate and vulgar words. If you thought the A's a-- hat was bad, get a load of what they did to the Astros, Texas Rangers, and Los Angeles Angels.

Astros’ bizarre new NSFW hat is pulled from shelves after hilarious oversight

If you super impose Houston's star logo with the letter H over the word Astros, all of the sudden, the "S" and "T" disappear behind the "H". That's not necessarily a hat that most Astros fans will be comfortable wearing in public.

Houston might have gotten off easy. Their AL West counterparts received much harsher treatments with the letter "A" replacing the "G" in Angels and the letter "T" replacing the "X" in Texas. Unfortunately, in doing so, the Rangers' hat became X-rated.

Now it can be said that mistakes happen, but this almost seems intentional on the part of New Era. Is Creed Bratton from "The Office" running their quality control department? This type of error is something you expect to see in a sitcom or a movie, not in real life.

Which makes one wonder if this was all just a publicity stunt in order to drive up sales. When you begin to dissect how atrocious the entire line of these "overlap" hats are, you begin to ponder whether or not a single adult was even in the room when this decision was made.

Sorry, Astros fans. If you had your heart set on purchasing the new "overlap" hat from New Era, you'll have to settle for one of the 27 others that are still available. The "BoBon Red Sox" and San Diego PaSDes" aren't exactly flying off the shelf. There are probably plenty of "MiMmi Marlins" left too. Of course, it's doubtful that the Marlins are even able to get anyone to buy an authentic on-field hat for that franchise.

More Houston Astros News and Rumors