Henderson RoadRunners

42

Those of you who have been reading this site for years already know where I stand on the issue of proper nicknames for teams. For those of you who are new, it's really quite simple. The nickname should inspire respect, admiration, or fear. In particular, if you're going to use an animal for your nickname, the animal should be powerful, inspire fear, or have special abilities. This is why names like Dragons, Colts, Orioles, and Vipers work, and why names like SandGnats and Grasshoppers don't.

I have no idea which category RoadRunners falls under.

As a general rule, pretty much all birds work because of that "special abilities" thing: all birds fly, so all bird names work. However, not all birds fly, and the name "roadrunner" implies that roadrunners do not, in fact, fly. So despite the fact that all birds work, "roadrunner" might not work.

That, however, ignores one detail, which is that roadrunners actually do fly. So the name works again, right?

Not so fast. No one thinks of the real bird when they hear "roadrunner". They think of the bird in the Warner Brothers cartoons. And that roadrunner never flew. So we're back to the name not working.

"But," you might say, "the road runner always came out on top. He was a winner, which is a good thing. So the name works again, right?" But how did the roadrunner always come out on top? Usually through no action of his own. All he ever did in the cartoons was run and occasionally stop to eat. Did he ever outsmart the coyote? No. He would occasionally outstupid the coyote (for example, by being too dumb to understand the concept of gravity), and the coyote outsmarted himself all the time. But the roadrunner never outsmarted the coyote. Granted, outstupiding your enemies is a perfectly viable strategy in the real world — it got George W. Bush re-elected, after all — but it's not something to emulate.

All that being said, the ability to hover in midair while watching a coyote fall to the ground is pretty darn nifty as special abilities go. So I suppose it's a good nickname after all.

As for the logo, it could be one of the best in all of baseball (indeed, in all of sports) if they didn't screw it up with the pointless baseball references. The colors are a good variation on a classic color scheme, and the drawing of the roadrunner itself is just amazing. It's extremely stylized, but there is absolutely no doubt what you're looking at. I seriously believe that if you removed everything from the logo but the bird itself, and showed it to 100 people who had never seen it before, over 80 of them would instantly understand that it was a roadrunner. When you consider that the bird is drawn out of nothing but a bunch of triangles, that's fairly impressive.

But the ball and bat kill it. First, they look ridiculous. (How on earth is the roadrunner holding that bat? And why is he swinging at such a high pitch?) Second, they throw off the composition of the logo; it's too heavy on the right side now. And remember what I said about being nothing but a bunch of triangles? That's a bold look for a logo, but the ball and bat are made of other shapes, which ruin the effect.

It drives me nuts when teams do something like this. And we all know what happened: The logo was designed with just the bird and the name, and it looked great, and the designer presented it to the team, and some numbskull (probably from the marketing department) said, "Oh it's horrible! How are the fans going to know it's a baseball team with no ball or bat in the logo?"

At this point, the designer should have said, "Oh, I don't know...maybe the fact that they're going to a baseball stadium to watch a team play a baseball game might tip them off!" Apparently the designer did not do this. Apparently he let himself be talked into adding the dreaded ball and bat. But he did get a certain amount of revenge by making the ball and bat look as ridiculous as possible. "You want to screw this logo up?" he said to himself as he made the ridiculous revisions. "Fine! But rest assured it will be screwed up!"

And so it is, Mr. Designer...so it is.

Final Score: 42 points.
Penalties: Software, 27 pts; Equipment (egregious), 27 pts.
Bonuses: Logo (half-bonus since the ball and bat weaken it), -6 pts; Local, -6 pts.