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Fayetteville Woodpeckers 90

Notice: All logos on this page are included within the parameters of 17 U.S.C. § 107, which states that the reproduction of a copyrighted work for purposes of criticism and/or comment is not an infringement of copyright. No challenge to the copyrights of these logos is intended by their inclusion here.
Posted 2022 July 10

There's no nice way to say it, but Fayetteville is has basically spent most of its existence playing second fiddle to one city or another, with only brief moments of primacy. Or third fiddle. Or viola. Or...you get the idea. This goes all the way back to its origin. It was created basically as an extension of the port city of Wilmington: a place upstream on the Cape Fear River to give people in the interior (which was basically frontier at the time) a place to sell their goods that would then go down the Cape Fear and through the port of Wilmington rather than down the Pee Dee and through the port of Georgetown, South Carolina. Decades later, when the decision was made to move the state capital inland from the coastal town of New Bern, Fayetteville was chosen...as a temporary capital while the purpose-built city of Raleigh was being built to serve as the permanent capital. The largest city in North Carolina has bounced around over time, and while Fayetteville managed to be the second-largest under different largest cities, it has never been the largest city.

Even today, despite being the sixth largest city in the state, it still doesn't have its own TV market. Instead, it's part of the Raleigh-Durham TV market, and while the local news broadcasts don't completely ignore it, they don't exactly give it a lot of attention, either.

This general lack of respect actually extends to their baseball situation as well. For years, there was no professional baseball team in the area at all — all they had was a team in the collegiate Coastal Plain League. Then Minor League Baseball announced that the Carolina League would expand from eight teams to ten and almost immediately awarded a franchise to...Kinston, a city a little over an hour away which is less than a tenth the size of Fayetteville. Deciding to give the other franchise to Fayetteville took a while, and even when it happened the team had to spend a couple of years playing in a the stadium of a small college about a half hour away because the CPL team's stadium wasn't even considered good enough to serve as a temporary home.

Perhaps befitting their second-fiddle status to Kinston, the new team picked a name which sounds suspiciously modeled after Kinston's. Wood Ducks, meet Woodpeckers. For the record, the team simply used their parent team's nickname for the two years they were in their temporary home, so it's not like they didn't know what the other team's name was going to be when they selected the Woodpeckers name. Sure, the team can call itself whatever it wants, but can and should are different words for a reason.

As for the logo, the team decided to go with that old standby, the anthropomorphized animal. For some reason they decided that a color scheme of grey-and-red would be a good idea; while this is a reasonably accurate color scheme for the actual birds (in reality the grey is a much darker shade, almost black), it makes for a pretty ugly logo. The least they could have done is give the bird in the logo a more colorful jersey, and maybe had a different color for the bat. Speaking of the bat, apparently the woodpecker got hungry and thought there might be some insects inside the bat, as he has pecked away a considerable part of it, which I'm thinking will have an unpredictable effect on how the bat swings and for all I know is against the rules. The W and S in the name have gotten a similar treatment, although the rest of the name has survived intact. The jersey has what appears to be (and is almost certainly intended to be) some kind of military patch, because Fayetteville.

I don't want to be too harsh, because it could certainly be so much worse. But I think we all agree it could be so much better. It's just so plain. No matter who they're playing, they'll almost always have the least interesting logo. Not always the worst, but always the least interesting. Of course, for a city that's been second-fiddle for so long, maybe that's appropriate.

Final Score: 90 points.
Penalties: Script, 7 pts; Humanoid, 30 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -6 pts.


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