Erie SeaWolves

257

It's rare that I look at a logo and my first thought is, quite literally, "yuck!" This is one of those rare occasions. Just about every element in this logo is an example of suck. First, the whole thing is very poorly drawn. The foreshortening is off, the upper and lower jaw are parallel despite the mouth being open, the hat is somehow in front of the right ear but behind the left, and the tongue is somehow curled into a ball in the front part of the mouth and totally absent in the back. The wolf has a single, T-shaped nostril. He inexplicably has two kerchiefs, one around the neck and one over the head. The lines in the two wooden bats are almost perfectly identical.

It racks up the points, too. For some reason, the artist gave this wolf a human eye. Given the quality of the rest of the art, I'd say it's because it's all he knows how to draw, but that ignores the fact that wolf eyes are actually easier to draw. And never in my life have I seen a team more insecure about the fact that a person looking at the logo might not know what sport the team plays. The wolf's head is in front of two baseball bats. As if that wasn't enough, there are two more bats on the wolf's hat, as well as a baseball. And there's a second baseball in the word (a poorly-drawn one at that: there's no angle from which you could look at a baseball logo and have the threads look like that). Those are the only pieces of equipment I could find, but I'm not convinced that it truly ends there. After all, once you've gone so far as stick six baseball references in your logo, why stop there? I spent the next half hour staring at the logo, trying to make certain I didn't leave anything out. Were any of those white circles on the kerchiefs actually tiny little drawings of baseballs? Was there a diamond hidden somewhere on the logo? Was the hat actually a very poorly drawn baseball cap? Was there any hint that the bats were in fact Russian Nesting Bats, with three or four smaller bats hidden inside? In the end, nothing. That's almost disappointing in a way. If you're going to go this crazy with the baseball references, you may as well shoot for double digits.

On top of all this, there's a clumsy fade effect in the word "Erie". I'm not certain if you can see it given the size of the logo on this page, but I assure you it's there. If you're wondering why this team earns the "colorful" penalty, that's why.

For any landlubbers reading this, the pirate hat is not actually an irrelevant feature. "Sea wolf" is a slang word for "pirate". So yes, it's relevant. And before anyone asks, yes, of course there were pirates on the Great Lakes. Name a body of water, and there have probably been pirates on it. There were pirates on the Ohio River at one point. There were pirates on the Hudson River. To this day there are pirates on the Allegheny River (sorry, couldn't resist). If you told me that the real reason Frederick Albert Cook couldn't prove his 1908 expedition made it to the North Pole was because his notes were stolen by Arctic pirates, it wouldn't surprise me a bit.

What would surprise me is seeing a pirate that is an actual wolf. This sort of word play, where you intepret the name literally instead of figuratively, is common in sports team logos. An "iron pig" is an ingot of the metal in question, but the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs have an actual pig in their logo. There was a roller hockey team several years ago called the Buffalo Wings, and the wing in their logo was neither a chicken wing nor covered in hot sauce. But this logo is a little different, because it manages to interpret "sea wolf" literally and figuratively at the same time. That's rare (the Lakeland Flying Tigers are the only other team I can think of that does this), and as far as I'm concerned they're just piling it on.

But on some level, I'm fine with that. See, if they're piling it on, then when it's time for me to start scoring the logo I can also pile it on and not feel a shred of guilt. And rest assured: I will, and I won't.

Final Score: 257 points.
Penalties: Wordplay, 23 pts; Software, 27 pts; Equipment (quintuply egregious), 93 pts; Humanoid, 30 pts; Colorful, 31 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -6 pts.