After admiring the guy’s playing for years, I bought an Anthony Rendon Washington Nationals jersey at the start of the 2019 season. They won the World Series but then let him sign with the Angels. Wonderful.
I’m a Nats fan myself, and Juan Soto is my favorite player, but I think I’ll wait until he’s comfortably signed with us as a free agent before I buy his jersey.
MLB jerseys are expensive, anyway.
Find a buddy or two, and go in on a large order from one of the Chinese bulk providers. I got a mess of jerseys with my brother and friends a few years ago, and I think once you hit 10+ jerseys, they were like $9 each.
Don’t do this. They are cheap looking, tacky, usually designed incorrectly and most importantly, it’s illegal (though largely unenforced).
I think my worst jersey was probably a Mark Prior jersey in 2003. Not super short-lived in terms of tenure, but certainly short lived in terms of joy.
Mine is indistinguishable from any I’ve seen in NFL Pro shops. I’m sure quality is spotty most of the time, but my brother found a good one.
The only thing “better” = worse than buying a jersey of a guy who promptly gets traded is buying a jersey of a guy who promptly gets arrested and unceremoniously dumped.
Been a lot of that lately.
I’m going to give an answer that’s blatantly outside the spirit of the question.
This summer, the Somerset Patriots (an independent league baseball team in New Jersey) couldn’t run their normal season, so they created a team to play a 13-game series against. The New Jersey Blasters had a nondescript clip art logo, were managed by the Patriots’ Director of Player Personnel, and were mostly made up of Somerset Patriots players and some local kids.
My wife and I attended the final Blasters game and I bought a jersey (nameless, as they all were) as a souvenir.
You can still buy their apparel.
IMO the Blasters logo is better than many higher levels of minor league sport.
And is specifically better than the local Miami Heat logo that always looks to me like nothing but a set of badly inflamed 'nads about to be elastrated.
Best off all, the Heat has recently decided to go all “urban neon” or something and the new logo is sort of electic blue and maroon, not red/orange. So now the 'nads are suffering from blood deprivation and are about to fall off.
It’s frankly worse than truck nuts. But at least it’s on many of the local license plates!