Team Nicknames
Hardball Times last week had a fun piece giving a Nickname Power Ranking. Guess who came in first?
When the NFL expanded to Seattle, the team released its plan for the logo and a large part of the city was offended. It fought for a totem-like bird, no frown, a rounded beak, sort of a glazed-eye cross between an Orca and a duck... we don't want something "hostile" on a football helmet that represents our genteel city. :- )
You think I'm kidding, I know...
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As a fan of the Reds, and thoroughly shamed by the Pilots with gold piping on their hats, I was bitterly disappointed by the selection of the nickname "Mariner." Non-hostility and friendliness is my motto, except when you're throwing elbows in the key.
Fortunately for me, the disillusionment over the "Mariner" name was quickly overwhelmed by the sight of the powder-blue pajamas the local ballplayers would wear... to me it was a uniform, and nickname, designed by ladies who were more than a little ashamed that our society still encourages athletic combat in the first place...
We wrote earlier that "hot" colors win more than "cool" ones. The city of Seattle quite consciously set out to present its baseball team as being as passive and inoffensive as possible. All the way with powder blue, Jay.
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=== HBT Criteria ===
I dunno what the author is thinking at HBT :- ) but it ain't about bloody knuckles and intimidation. A great nickname, for him, connects to the city and "is cool."
What's cool? Well, cool starts with confidence, goes to wit, freshness, and mystique...
I guess the powder-blue unies were confident, in the sense that you've got to be confident to wear highwater pants and hornrims to high school. If you're one of the 1-in-10,000 who can pull Kurt Cobain off, you're the coolEST. Whether Mariner is so nerdy as to get into Kurt Cobain territory, you be the judge...
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Completely throwing me into vertigo, the article panned the AquaSox nickname. Now how can you get a better blend of classic-and-local than that?!
Granted, green is a "cool," non-hostile color. But at least it's neon. So you've got a disquieting little insinuation of insanity with their unies... Hanson Brothers, maybe?
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You could invert HBT's list, go 30-1, and the correlation with my own list would go wayyyyyyyyyy up.
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=== Around the League Dept. ===
I agree with the Diamondbacks' high ranking: it connects to the Southwest, and rattlesnakes qualify as unfriendly and intimidating, I would think.
The D-Backs also have fresh colors and the D-Snake works. If you can't be classic, can't have the Reds' or Dodgers' or Yankees' look, then it would be hard to beat Arizona for a 21st-century sports-warrior vibe.
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Texas Rangers are 2 degrees off: police officers don't show up at a gladitorial arena to fight. But still, it's regional, it's confrontational and it works. But their unies don't pull the law-enforcement idea off.
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Rockies works for me: outsdoorsmen are tough hombres. The word conveys the guttural hardness of the concept.
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Toronto Blue Jays is almost as bad as Mariners, and HBT's comment on this logo, at #9, I think gets across the divide between him and myself...
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White Sox and Red Sox, to me, do not conjure images of smelly footwear, as they do the HBT. They conjure images of Hal Chase grabbing a runner's belt as he goes around first, of 1897 players spiking each other, of the time when men played baseball not for money, but in hopes of injuring one another.
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=== Insta-Poll Dept. ===
We found ourselves wondering whether HBT speaks for the 21st-century fan, where "pretty bird, pretty nickname, nice colors to go with it, I just like it" is what goes into a "cool" nickname. I dunno what's next. The Portland Pink Ribbons?
Chime in. Maybe intimidation is passe when it comes to marketing. If so, we can always make up for it with Erik Bedard.
Cheers,
Dr D