St. Louis “Cards” Tee: Success of Form and Function

Readers may recall that I was quite unsparing in my ridicule of the last T-shirt I was tasked with reviewing. The shirt was so hideous that it soured me to shirts in general. For the past 4+ months I have gone topless, patiently waiting for a great T-shirt to come along and redeem the whole species for me. So, with winter fast approaching, the above shirt couldn’t arrive at a better time.

Made by Nike, this “St. Louis Cardinals World Championship King Tee” can be yours for just 20 bucks. Whereas the Cliff Lee-designed T-Shirt was an abject failure of both form and function, I am pleased to say that this shirt is a rousing success in each of these essential areas.

Form: 

What a cool looking shirt! The “card” motif (which, if you’ll forgive my momentary joke-killing, has a double meaning) is seamlessly integrated with the baseball aspect, with neither ingredient overpowering the other. For example, rather than overdoing it with Cardinals logos, “St. Louis Cardinals” appears once in the middle of the shirt in a reasonably sized font and the King (the symbol of supremacy) dons a Cardinals hat. The beauty is in the subtlety. You’ll notice also that where the suit would normally appear on the playing card is instead a home plate. Details like that are what make this shirt so cool that it almost brings me to a point of possibly maybe entertaining the notion of wishing I was a Cards fan so I could wear this shirt. Kudos are in order for the Nike design team. Simply put, the vast gulf in quality between this shirt and Cliff Lee’s atrocity illustrates why they are paid to do this and Cliff Lee is not.

Function: 

It’s a shirt. As long as you can wear it, it will pass the basic “function” test. What I am interested in, though, are the alternative uses for the article of clothing at hand. And that’s the beauty part with this shirt. It’s not just a shirt, but it’s an actual playing card. An anecdote: From middle school through high school, I was a competitive chess player. When I was in middle school, our coach decided to stage an elaborate game of “human chess.” It was exactly what it sounds like. Using tape and poster board, he constructed a board on the ground. The students dressed as the chessmen and the two best players on the team directed us. When one piece captured another piece, we acted out dramatic death scenes. It was quite a lot of fun.

Now suppose we were to play a game of “human solitaire” (alternate possibilities: human war, human poker, human blackjack, human go fish, human any card game in existence). This shirt would work perfectly well as a costume for either of the red kings in the deck. Where you might encounter difficulty is finding 52 people who are willing to act out a game of solitaire for you and finding/making/paying for shirts to represent the other 51 cards in the deck, but this can hardly be held against this shirt.

Conclusion: 

A totally bitchin’ shirt that makes me wish the Phillies were called “the Cardinals” and that they won the World Series this year.

h/t Jesse Wolfersberger for the link