Elizabethton Twins

49

I'm no fan of farm teams naming themselves after their parent at the best of times. This isn't the best of times. It isn't the worst of times, either, but it's down there. When a team in Des Moines calls itself the Cubs or a team in Salem, Virginia calls itself the Red Sox, no one can say the name is any less appropriate there than it is where the parent team uses it. Not so here. The Minnesota Twins are called the Twins because they play in the Twin Cities. The Elizabethton Twins don't. In fact, they play in an area of Tennessee known as the Tri-Cities. It seems to me that if the team in Elizabethton wanted to use a name based on its parent team, they could go with the Elizabethton Triplets instead. That's kind of a silly name, but it's no worse than Minnesota Twins if you think about it; furthermore, the wordplay would be kind of clever. And the logo could be made to work with only a minor modification.

Then again, you could name the team the Elizabethton Duck-Billed Platypuses and the logo could be made to work with only a minor modification. That's because there isn't an actual twin in Minnesota's logo. No matter what name the Elizabethton team went with, all you'd really need to do is replace one word with another. True, the name is the main feature of the logo, but I still consider that a minor change. Be that as it may, all that really needs to be done for Elizabethton is replace "Minnesota" with "Elizabethton" in their logo, but the team has chosen to do more than that. First, whereas Minnesota's logo is a BIC* and has the words "Minnesota" and "Baseball Club" written in the circle, Elizabethton's logo gets rid of the circle. Second, the word "Twins" is scooched down on the baseball in order to make room for the name of the city on the baseball itself. (The name of the city, incidentally, is written in Helvetica font, which makes it look like someone couldn't be bothered to put any more than the bare minimum effort into adding the city name. I'd have at least spent fifteen minutes playing with all the fonts on my computer, and I'd have probably picked something better than Helvetica.) Finally, the stitching on the baseball is different. It's narrower in Elizabethton's logo, and is oriented in a mostly vertical fashion; in Minnesota's logo, the stitching is basically at the same angle as the word "Twins".

I know I should not be surprised that Elizabethton uses the same name as and a very similar logo to its parent. The Elizabethton Twins play in the Appalachian League, a league where every team has the same name as its parent team and only one of them (the Johnson City Cardinals) has a logo not heavily based on the parent team. But it doesn't have to be this way. The other Advanced Rookie league, the Pioneer league, has only one team that takes its parent team's name. It hasn't always been this way in the Appalachian League, and there's no rule requiring teams to use their parent's name, so why don't the teams start doing like the Pioneer League teams do and forge their own identity? I'm sure all of them point to the other teams and say, "Well, all the other teams are doing it..." The change has to start somewhere, so why not with the team where the parent's name makes the least sense? Come on, Elizabethton, you can do this. Even if you just go with "Triplets", it'll be something. Dare to be different. It won't hurt. Really, it won't.

* Baseball In a Circle

Final Score: 49 points.
Penalties: Offspring, 12 pts; Equipment, 13 pts; Letter, 24 pts.
Bonuses: None.