One of the perils of building a statue for someone is that you’re going to get something wrong. Sometimes that can come in the form of a face that looks nothing like the honoree or it can come in the form of a tiny detail that doesn’t make sense. Whether or not the error ruins the appreciation of the person in question is up to the beholder.
The New York Mets appear to be looking at one such situation as it has been revealed that the recently unveiled statue honoring Tom Seaver includes the wrong number font on the back of the jersey.
EXCLUSIVE: Today I have a scoop on a significant design error in the Mets’ Tom Seaver statue. The Mets declined to comment, but I talked at some length with the sculptor about how this could have happened.
Read here (no subscription needed for this one): https://t.co/03ck255IyT
— Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) May 9, 2022
The issue was uncovered by, of course, Uni Watch. Paul Lukas was contacted by a reader who pointed out that the “4” in Seaver’s No. 41 jersey is lacking the small stub extending off the right side of the numeral that would have been in his actual Mets jersey.
As Lukas notes, few others seemed to have picked up on the error in the 3,200-pound sculpture situated outside Citi Field, but when Lukas reached out to sculptor William Behrends, he noticed the difference and said that he simply missed it.
@UniWatch @PhilHecken @StevenACohen2 @mets Saw Seaver statue for first time. The 4 font is incorrect on the back. Doubt they can fix it at this point. pic.twitter.com/povKtsWIqe
— Batbeat (@Batbeat2) April 29, 2022
“That clay model, I worked on that for about 10 and a half months. I laid out the torso, laid out the the uniform, and blocked in the letters,” Behrends explained. “At an early stage, I know I had that little stub on the ‘4.’ But during the process of adjusting the model, you take things off and rebuild them elsewhere. So those numbers were probably built and rebuilt five or six times in the process. And in the later part of the process, I clearly was not thinking about the number — I was thinking about other things, and I just missed it. It’s embarrassing.”
Interestingly enough, fans who attended the Mets game on the day of the unveiling received a small replica of the statue which included the correct font. Behrends assumes that he had the font correctly in an early rendering but changed it afterward without realizing it. He noted that he sent photos of the statue throughout its development to the Mets organization and never heard about a font issue but wanted to be clear that the mistake was “all me.”
Behrends said it would be possible to fix the error, though the Mets have not asked him to do so and it’s unclear if they’ll feel the need.
