Over the course of the past week or so, pretty much every team in baseball has taken time out of its busy Spring Training schedule to stand in front of professional men with professional cameras. Such is the annual Photo Day. It’s a time for players and coaches alike to pose for pictures to be distributed to various outlets, and a time to recite scripted shorts for the scoreboards, and other things in that vein. It’s a casual day, and nobody goes into it expecting much out of the norm, but every so often you stumble across a gem in the talus, and these are those gems.
The Five Worst Photos From This Year’s MLB Photo Days
I’ll be upfront about it and confess that, no, I didn’t look at every single picture taken and developed and posted online from every single team’s photo day, but I looked at most of them, and I have a hard time imagining that anything I didn’t see could top any one of these. On we go.
(5) All Detroit Tigers photographed with a blue gel on the lights. Not every picture in the entire Tigers photoset was taken this way, but every player seems to have at least one or two blue gel images to his name. I don't have anything against the idea of a Getty photographer trying to spice things up by doing something new, but the end result of this unfortunate exercise in creativity is that the Tigers come away looking like the music in a Cymbalta ad sounds.
(4) All Philadelphia Phillies photographed with a red gel on the lights. Just like with the Tigers, not every Phillies picture is colored, but every Phillie has colored pictures. Turns out it was the same photographer. Who knew? Because the Tigers and the Phillies had the same concept it’s hard to rank one over the other, but the Phillies get #4 because Raul Ibanez looks like he just pulled me over for drunk driving and now I feel ashamed of myself.
(3) Angel Pagan. You can’t act tough in a nametag, no matter how ghetto the nametag.
(2) Matt Belisle. When you scroll through a lot of the pictures from photo day, a pattern that emerges quickly is that most of the players and coaches aren’t smiling. Enough players and coaches aren’t smiling, in fact, that one’s left believing that the default recommendation is to look stern and standoffish. Someone thought Matt Belisle might look best trying something else, and thus someone gave Matt Belisle bad advice.
(1) Wandy Rodriguez and Carlos Lee’s tongue. The lights were off, but now they’re on, and nobody’s really sure what to do, so let’s all stand here and not move and stare at each other for a few seconds until we each independently arrive at the conclusion that it’s probably best left unexplained.
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