It must be a tough job to rebuild a team, especially when you don’t have enough jerseys for players to tryout in.
Reinhold Matay/USA TODAY Sports
Apparently the New York Yankees are encountering a strange problem at spring training this year: they’re running out of jersey numbers.
Yes, they are literally running out of numbers to give the players.
Seeing how they can start at zero and go all the way to 99, you’d think that would be impossible. But with such a storied franchise such as the Yankees, it’s actually not that hard to believe. Just take a look out past the outfield wall at Yankees Stadium and you can see all the numbers that are currently retired. That’s not even counting the ones you know they’re going to retire in the near future, like Derek Jeter’s number two, Jorge Posada’s number 20 and Bernie Williams’ number 51. Posada and Williams are to have their numbers retired to Monument Park this season, along with Andy Pettite’s 46.
The team has so many historical players, that they currently have 23 numbers that are unavailable, according to The New York Times.
So, with the current expanded spring training rosters, how many numbers are available that haven’t been retired, are going to be retired or have not been taken already?
Four.
Yep, a whopping four number: 38, 50, 57 and 69.
None of those numbers are necessarily sexy or popular (oh, get your mind out of the gutter).
So how do we solve this problem once a few more Yankees greats have their numbers retired?
Maybe we can go with a decimal system? Anyone with the last name Pie can be 3.14? No? How about we go with something like the Periodic Table? Na? Meh, that’ll probably just confuse a lot of people.
I guess they’re just going to either have to move into the triple digits or just start “unretiring” numbers.
H/T: The New York Times
