Major League Baseball gets with the times and allows personalized bat decals

A couple of weeks ago, we shared with you all the sad news that Major League Basebal had decided to clamp down on — of all things — personalized bat decals. It was a pretty weird move for MLB to make, and it really seemed like they were being sticks in the mud for no big reason at all.

Well, it appears that MLB has softened their stance on the position. In case you may have missed it, Bryce Harper — in his eternal journey to “Make Baseball Fun Again” — decided to have fun with an impending milestone (his 100th career home run) by placing a 100 emoji decal on his bat knob.

This raised the question of whether or not MLB decided to rescind the ban on bat knob decals, or if Harper was just being a rebel. As it turns out, both were correct. According to Paul Lukas of Uni-Watch, baseball has decided to take their sticks out of the mud and will allow personalized bat decals. However, this memo went out on April 13th, and Harper (and a few other players across baseball as well) was using personalized decals before the rule went by the wayside, so maybe Harper was really sticking it to the man, here.

Good job, MLB. It was dumb to ban these in the first place since nearly all of the personalized bat decals were in good fun, so it’s good to see that they’ve come to their senses and let the players express themselves.