On May 16, 2012, someone at the design firm GD Squared was watching a Seattle Mariners game on TV and noticed that the lettering on the back of pitcher Charlie Furbush’s jersey didn’t look quite right. The bad news was that the spacing between some of the letters looked a bit off; the worse news was that the spacing glitch made Furbush’s name read like a sophomoric dirty joke.
That tweet, posted just over 10 years ago, is the earliest example I’ve been able to find of a social media post pointing out typographic problems with player-surname lettering on Seattle’s navy jersey. (This lettering is also known as an “NOB,” short for “name on back.”) Since then, spotting the various lettering issues on the back of Seattle’s navy alternate jerseys has become something of an internet sport. Unlike “Fur Bush,” the other problematic NOBs don’t read like outtakes from a softcore porn movie, but they still look pretty bad.
