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   Bernardino

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Lancaster Barnstormers 16

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 2015 August 15

Just about any new sports team, when it's in the process of figuring out what name it's going to use, is bound to ask itself at some point "What is the city we're playing in best known for?" Sometimes that suggests a great name, and sometimes it doesn't suggest much of anything because the town isn't know for anything specific. When Lancaster, Pennsylvania got a new team, it had a different problem. It's best known for Amish people, and it's really hard to find a way to name a team for a religious minority without coming across as being bigoted as hell. This is especially true when you consider that, Amish culture being what it is, there aren't likely to be any Amish people among the ownership group or playing for the team, and probably not even any among the fan base. And even if you ignore those problems, few groups have a reputation less intimidating than the Amish. Calling your team the Vikings? Sure, everyone gets that. Pirates? Yeah, that works. Fighting Irish? It's not PC and I doubt a new team could get away with using that name today, but we all at least understand that there used to be a stereotype of lower-class Irish-Americans getting into a lot of fights. But the Amish? If you tried to name a team the Fighting Amish, people would be too busy laughing at the absurdity of it to worry about whether it was offensive. No one associates the Amish with violence unless they've been watching a laughably implausible show on Discovery Channel. No, what people associate the Amish with is technophobia and raising barns. That means that naming a team after the Amish isn't going to work, and naming it after things associated with the Amish isn't likely to work much better.

Fortunately for the team in Lancaster, there's that whole "raising barns" thing, combined with an old term for teams that travel from town to town playing sports despite not being part of an official league. Thus, the Lancaster Barnstormers name was born. So what if the Barnstormers are most emphatically not a barnstorming team? It sounds good (possibly even mildly intimidating thanks to the "storm" part), and it has an obvious tie-in to the area. As an added bonus, "barnstorming" also happens to be a term for performing stunts in old airplanes, which means it's easy to come up with a logo for the team that isn't just a drawing of some old barn.

Which is why I'm puzzled that their logo is just a drawing of some old barn.

It's like the team decided to use the most exciting name possible with a local connection, and then decided to use the most boring logo possible with the name they chose. What makes this even worse is that they could simply replace the baseball with a biplane, and it would be a decent logo. In fact, the trajectory of the baseball as shown in the logo makes absolutely no sense as the trajectory of a baseball, but could conceivably be the trajectory of a barnstorming plane. There's a golden opportunity here that they're missing. I'd say they've dropped the ball, but that's exactly wrong. They need to drop the ball.

Final Score: 16 points.
Penalties: Equipment, 13 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -9 pts.


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