Tri-City Dust Devils

156

Rarely is a geographic moniker quite as useless in determining where a team actually plays as it is in the case of the Tri-City Dust Devils.

If you live in the United States, there's a decent chance there's a "Tri-City" area in your state. Maybe more than one. There are a couple in Canada for good measure, as well as other countries. To give you an idea how many there are in America, here are the places in the United States listed as either "Tri-City" or "Tri-Cities" on Wikipedia's disambiguation page for "Tri-Cities":

• Fremont, Newark, and Union City CA
• Carlsbad, Oceanside, and Vista CA
• Batavia, Geneva, and St. Charles IL
• Bay City, Midland, and Saginaw MI
• Dover, Rochester, and Somersworth NH
• Blanchard, Newcastle, and Tuttle OK
• Canyonville, Myrtle Creek, and Riddle OR
• Bristol, Johnson City, and Kingsport TN
• Colonial Heights, Hopewell, and Petersburg VA
• Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland WA

This team isn't even the only minor league baseball team using Tri-City as its geographic moniker. There's also the Tri-City ValleyCats, who play all the way across the country in upstate New York. I acknowledge that this happens occasionally with actual city names (Burlington Bees in Iowa and Burlington Royals in North Carolina; Charlotte Knights in North Carolina and Charlotte Stone Crabs in Florida; Lancaster Barnstormers in Pennsylvania and Lancaster JetHawks in California...oddly, the one example you'd expect to find, Portland ME and Portland OR, isn't here because Portland OR lost its baseball team in 2010). But somehow it's more grating to see this sort of duplication for a region's nickname, especially when the nickname is this generic. Just call yourself the Pasco Dust Devils, guys. Sure, no one really knows where Pasco is, but no one really knows which Tri-City you're talking about, so it wouldn't make matters any worse.

But really, the problem with the "Tri-City" portion of the name pales in comparison to the problem with the logo.

Can anything positive be said about this logo? Well, yes, I suppose. The logo clearly features a dust devil. That's about as far as it gets. The horns and tail on the dust devil are silly, the face ridiculous, the rings around the tail confusing, the skill with which it was drawn lacking. The way the words "Dust Devils" are written reminds me of Brøderbund's Print Shop circa 1991, and the baseball reinforces this. What I'm saying, basically, is that it reminds me of some of the logos I've come up with over the years for fantasy teams, and some of my efforts were better than this. Compare this logo to, say, the Peoria Chiefs. The Chiefs have an awful logo, but you look at it and know that the person who drew that logo is a competent artist. You don't know that with the Dust Devils logo. I understand that the Northwest League, where the Dust Devils play, is a short-season A league and thus its teams may not have the biggest budgets. But none of the other logos are like this. Each one, good or bad, is at least well-executed. If I drew this, then in all honesty I think I'd be somewhat ashamed. I think I'd want to hide somewhere where no one could find me.

So I suppose it's convenient for whoever drew this that the name "Tri-City" is so generic. The artist will be safely ensconced in Washington, and you'll be trying to find them in Virginia or Illinois or who knows where.

Final Score: 156 points.
Penalties: Region, 8 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Equipment, 13 pts; Humanoid (egregious), 61 pts, Cartoon, 47 pts; Name, 10 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None.