Batavia Muckdogs

130

Let's cut right to the chase. Where the muck did this team come up with their nickname?

Apparently the team used to be called the Batavia Clippers, but when they opened a new stadium they decided to change their name in order to...well, I'm not certain precisely why they felt a new stadium meant they should pick a new nickname, but I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. The new nickname was, according to the team website, "chosen by the fans in a stimulating contest". I love that phrase. That is a phrase that could only be dreamed up by a press-release writer for a small company. No one who wasn't writing a press release would feel the need to play up a name-the-team contest, and no one slick enough to be working for a big company would come up with anything as clumsy as calling a contest "stimulating" unless the contest was for either Maxwell House or Penthouse. And if the contest was for one of these companies, you wouldn't be talking about something being chosen by the fans. You'd be talking about something being chosen by the addicts.

So what does the name refer to? Again, I quote from the team website: "The name Muckdogs identifies the area with its strong agricultural background especially the importance of the rich Elba muck land." Elba Muck? Who's Elba Muck? It sounds like the name of a person mentioned in a bluegrass song. There's a song by an artist named Mike Cross called "Elma Turl". It starts off with the line "Elma Turl is a beautiful girl", and the second verse begins with "Alice Green is a beautiful thing." I could easily see a verse added about Elba Muck, who's a...

Oh, get your minds out of the gutter. Elba Muck is a real odd duck, that's what she is. Are you people stuck in junior high school or something?

As it turns out, Elba muck is not a person. Elba muck is a type of soil, more properly known as Orleans-Genesee Muckland. It's black in color, and apparently it's about 80% organic matter (which sounds impressive, but I have no idea what the organic component of other soils is, so it may be typical or even low). It's apparently great for growing food, but for various reasons using farm equipment in mucky areas results in the soil getting compacted so much that in many areas you need ramps to get the equipment down to the fields. In other words, from a visual perspective, muck sucks.

With that in mind, the logo does make a certain sense. The logo features a dog with black dirt all over it. This makes sense. If anything, there's not enough dirt. Dogs, you see, love to roll around in the dirt. They love rolling around in the mud even more. I speak, unfortunately, from firsthand experience. Longtime readers may remember Larson, a greyhound my wife and I had a few years ago. There was a ballfield in town where the greyhound owners would gather every Sunday morning to let their dogs run around for a bit. This was fine on dry days. But if it had been raining, the dogs would usually decide in fairly short order to hold an impromptu "King of Mud" contest. Larson was not the best at getting mud into every inch of his fur, but he did often place second. And what, you may wonder, would the dogs do when the "King of Mud" competition was over? They'd come to where the humans are and try to lean against the humans so we would pet them. Some of the owners would try to avoid the dogs, but it was pointless: the dogs could be quite determined, and it's not like any of us could outrun a greyhound. And after they were done getting petted, it was time to go home. Some of the other owners wisely had SUVs or vans with a bunch of old towels in the back so that it didn't really matter. My wife and I had a sedan with seats whose color was nowhere near that of the mud, and we did not have enough old towels. Fortunately, it doesn't rain a ridiculous amount in Raleigh. If I had lived in Seattle, I have no doubt I'd have gotten to be on a first name basis with the guys at Auto Bell.

Greyhounds rolling around in the mud, incidentally, have a look of joy on their face that has to be seen to be believed. The dog in this logo, on the other hand, looked positively deranged. He sees something or someone off to the viewer's left, and whatever or whoever it is, the dog is about to kill it. He's brushed his teeth (note the sparkle effect on the one tooth) just for the occasion. The fence, which is broken (and M-shaped, never mind the fact that real fences would never have that arrangement of boards) isn't going to stop him. And just for good measure, he's got two baseballs sitting in the mud on either side. I have no idea what the baseballs are doing there. Maybe the kids next door were throwing baseballs at him to taunt him. They thought they could get away with it because the fence would contain him. They were wrong. And now, as he climbs over the fence, the horror of the situation is slowly dawning on those kids. The moment that first paw went over the fence, they froze. Then the head went over, and they started to tremble. And just a second from now, the two hind paws are going to come over the fence. And at that point, they will know one thing with a certainty only available to people in that situation.

They will know that they are totally mucked.

Final Score: 130 points.
Penalties: Compound, 34 pts; Equipment (egregious), 27 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts, Name, 10 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None