An hour and 23 minutes after the world learned about Orlando Arcia’s clubhouse taunting of Bryce Harper on Tuesday morning, BreakingT intern Aaron Clark put the tweet into the company’s Slack with the disclaimer: “to keep in the bag if Bryce has a moment in this series.”
It only took 61 minutes of Wednesday’s Game 3 of the National League Division Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves for that moment to arrive, as Harper crushed a three-run homer off Braves starter Bryce Elder — and then stared down Arcia as he circled the bases. Polo Shirt
By the time Harper hit his second home run, the BreakingT team already had a concept in mind. In Phoenix, one of the company’s designers, Colin Gauntlett, was watching the game and immediately started working up a sketch, in part to get it done before heading to the Diamondbacks’ game himself.
The game in Philadelphia wasn’t even over before the team submitted their final design to the Major League Baseball Players Association for approval, which came by 9:55 p.m., 29 minutes after the final out of the Phillies’ victory. The red t-shirt with Harper’s image, the phrase “ATTA-BOY HARPER!” in all caps and Harper’s signature was on the company’s website by 10:15 p.m. and it was just before 11 a.m. the next day that the first shirts were produced at the printing facility just outside Washington D.C. used by the company. The company’s founder and CEO, Alex Welsh, was at the facility and hand-delivered an order to a local loyal customer before he left to get to Philadelphia — where he had tickets for Game 4.
Sitting at the confluence of sport, social media, commerce and technology is the humble T-shirt. The internet and print-on-demand technology have made getting products from the idea stage to market nearly instantaneous. Thanks to innovation and supply chain optimization, a customer can buy a T-shirt referencing a moment from Wednesday’s game and receive it in time to wear to the ballpark on Thursday.
“For it to be a Phillies player in a really dramatic, high-profile series against the Braves — and for it to be Bryce Harper and for him to answer the call with two home runs at (Citizens Bank Park), it was just perfect,” said BreakingT president Jamie Mottram in a phone interview Friday. And at this point, he made the sound that is universally associated with the term “chef’s kiss.”
In 2023, the T-shirt industrial complex is in full effect. Harper’s staredown was the perfect storm of player, moment, hero, villain, setting and a quick, easy phrase that can launch a million shirts. The cycle has been repeated so many times over the past several years, from Max Muncy’s “Go get it out of the ocean” shirts in response to Madison Bumgarner to the “Votto still bangs” shirt inspired by an article in The Athletic.
While the big companies such as Nike and Majestic often require months of lead time to fill orders, the smaller companies like BreakingT, Rotowear and In The Clutch Apparel can turn a trending Tweet, viral moment or just a rookie call-up into a product available online or even at the ballpark in a matter of hours.
Working with a license from the Major League Baseball Players Association, the companies can get approval quickly instead of the lengthy process through Major League Baseball and its teams to use their logos, which is why the pictures of Harper on the shirts don’t include the team’s name.
“When we capture a moment and submit artwork to them for approval, that’s sometimes a text message,” Mottram said. “Because we’re partners in this, the speed to market is so important, so we’re mutually incentivized when a moment like this happens. We don’t want to wait around and they don’t want us to wait around.”
BreakingT isn’t alone in this category. Like BreakingT, Cincinnati’s In the Clutch Apparel also has a license with the MLBPA and now sells two different shirts featuring Harper’s homer.
“We’re working a Diamondbacks in the pool design at the same time we’re working on the Atta-boy shirt,” said In the Clutch founder Josh Sneed. “We’re also trying to figure out what we can do with the Rangers and Astros.”
Ever since Thomas Dewey made a “Dew-it-with Dewey” campaign T-shirt in 1948, the simple cotton tee has been the way for Americans to advertise their opinion or loyalty about politics, sports, music or any and everything else. T-shirts have been a way to tell people you were at a concert or a big game — as often sold outside the venue out of cardboard boxes with questionable quality and certainly no approval — or inside with the performer getting some part of the profit.
Making a buck off of Arcia’s clubhouse faux pas isn’t limited to BreakingT and In the Clutch. A quick Google search will return any number of shirts with the slogan available from just about every corner of the world.
RotoWear, another popular t-shirt company, has an MLBPA license, but wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that it wouldn’t print Atta-boy Harper shirts as not to offend Atlanta fans, a choice criticized only by at least one other company, The 7 Line, who noted Rotowear had made shirts critical of Mets players.
Braves fans have been my most supportive fanbase since pretty much day one. A lot of players on the team have been wearing my shirts for years. Maybe I never even get RotoWear to a full-time thing if it isn’t for them. I don’t care if I’d sell 10,000 of these, ain’t no way that’s… https://t.co/eZ0bYCC93j
The Phillies themselves had no such reservations. In Thursday’s postgame celebration, reliever Orion Kerkering wore a baby blue shirt with the phrase “Atta Boy Harper” in all maroon caps with a white outline on the front and a quote from Arcia, “He wasn’t supposed to hear it,” on the back.
But this wasn’t an example of one of the businesses getting great product placement, just an old-school, do-it-yourself attempt. Kerkering asked a college teammate from Philadelphia to help make him a shirt following Wednesday’s game and a day later Kerkering’s shirt was doused with champagne and beer.
While Kerkering’s friend doesn’t have any plans on turning his shirt into an industry, funny shirts have been part of Sneed’s income since the early 2000s when the stand-up comedian and a fellow Cincinnati-area comedian started Look At Me Shirts, focusing on humorous t-shirts.
The pair turned to local nostalgia when their 2008 “Even God Hates the Steelers” shirt took off and they turned their focus on their home, starting Cincy Shirts, which mostly focused on long-defunct Cincinnati-area sports teams, restaurants and bars. In 2012, then-Reds rookie Todd Frazier performed the Heimlich maneuver in a Pittsburgh restaurant to save a life. The company made a shirt based on a safety poster. It was instantly a hit and that led to seeking out licensing deals with local colleges and eventually professional sports teams.
Throughout more than a decade of business, Sneed said it’s baseball that has always been the company’s best seller. While Sneed also cheers for other local teams, the Reds have his heart and most of his attention. Yes, you can get a Joe Burrow shirt from CincyShirts, but the boys of summer make for the best business, Sneed said.
“Baseball is unique because of the amount of games there are and the time of year,” Sneed said. “You’re outside and you want to wear something fun or funny or they might look to wear something different the next time they go. It’s such a unique thing for baseball, but it’s one of the things we’ve leaned into.”
(Top photo of the Phillies clubhouse NLDS celebration, featuring an Atta Boy Harper shirt: Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)
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Blank T Shirt C. Trent Rosecrans is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the Cincinnati Reds. He previously covered the Reds for the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Post and has also covered Major League Baseball for CBSSports.com. Follow C. Trent on Twitter @ctrent