Hub City Spartanburgers

153

Right now, there are six cities whose name ends in -burg(h) that have a baseball team: Fredericksburg, Virginia; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Lynchburg, Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Schaumburg, Illinois. In the history of baseball there are simply too many to count. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone in one of these cities decided to simply add -ers to the end of the city name to make the team's nickname. And given some recent trends in sports names — most notably the trend of using regional names or city nicknames for the locative portion of the name, allowing teams to avoid repetitious names like the Gettysburg Gettysburgers — I suppose it was more likely to happen now than at any time in the past. And given that there's a certain style of logo that many burger chains have had over the years, it was probably inevitable that when a team picked a -burger name they'd end up with a logo like this. In other words, I can't honestly say I expected something like this, but now that it's happened I can't honestly say I'm surprised.

And I probably shouldn't be surprised that it was a team in Spartanburg that did it. The name doesn't work with other cities nearly as well. An actual burger chain called Fredericksburger would inevitably lead to jokes about what poor Frederick did to deserve being made into a burger. Schaumburger would inevitably lead to people asking what a schaum is and why would you want to make a burger out of it. And looking at some -burg(h) cities that used to have teams but no longer do, I don't even want to consider the jokes that would be made if there was a chain called Johnsonburger or Petersburger. But Spartanburger? I can actually see a burger chain calling itself that. I can even see its signature item being a burger called "The 300" — a burger with a 300-miligram patty. That's not actually a practical size (roughly two thirds of a pound), but I could see them having it on the menu just for the heck of it.

There is, incidentally, a term for the style of sign that the logo emulates: Googie (both g's are hard, so "goo ghee", not "goo jee".) Technically that refers to the architecture style more than the signs themselves, but the buildings and the signs go together. It's kind of hard to describe the Googie style, but a list of examples should help at least my older readers get it: Think about 50s-era McDonald's where the arches were actually part of the building. Think about the old, gigantic Holiday Inn signs. Think about a typical Sonic Drive-In, even today. Or, hell, just do an image search for "Googie Architecture". You'll see what I mean, and you'll see how the Spartanburgers logo fits right in.

I don't personally like this logo. I'm not a fan of Googie, and the logo mimics it a little too well. But I do appreciate the logo. I understand that given the name, the logo really needed to look like this. So while I don't like this logo, I'm not going to make fun of it.

And I feel roughly the same about the name. I don't like the name. But sooner or later somebody was going to do it, and better Spartanburg than Harrisburg.

Or, gods help us, Petersburg.

Scoring Note: I considered the possibility that the team didn't deserve the -Ers and Compound penalties because people from Spartanburg call themselves Spartanburgers, which would mean the team didn't make up the name. But from what I can find people from Spartanburg call themselves Spartans, which means that the team did make up the name and does deserve the penalties.

Final Score: 153 points.
Penalties: -Ers, 26 pts; Compound, 34 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Equipment (egregious), 27 pts; Humanoid, 30 pts; Colorful, 31 pts.
Bonuses: None.