Binghamton Senators

70

If I gave these pages subtitles, the subtitle for this page would be "The Worst of Both Worlds".

On the one hand, we've got the rather pathetic spectacle of a team using its parent team's name despite a complete lack of appropriateness. A team in Ottawa can call itself the Senators because Ottawa is the capital of Canada and thus has a lot of senators in town (105 to be exact…why a country with one sixth the population of the United States needs more senators is an interesting question, but I'm sure the Canadians are wondering why a country with six times the population of Canada thinks it can get by with fewer senators, so I'm just not going to go there). But Binghamton is not the capital of the United States. It isn't even the capital of New York State. It is the county seat of Broome County, but when have you ever heard of a county having a senate? They could have at least called themselves the Binghamton Commissioners in recognition of Binghamton's diminutive status.

The other problem is (you saw this coming, didn't you?) the logo. The Ottawa Senators have a decent logo. It's not fantastic, but it's pretty good, especially when you consider the difficulty of making a good logo for a team called "Senators". (I must admit I don't understand why anyone thinks "Senators" is a good team name. I'm rather glad the Washington baseball team decided to go with "Nationals" instead, although "Washington Nationals" doesn't exactly light my candle, either.) Binghamton's logo, on the other hand, is your typical minor-league fare. Let's take a cartoony hockey player and replace his helmet with something representative of the team name. Ho-hum. Admittedly it would be kind of neat if hockey players really did wear those Roman helmets, but they don't. And I really don't think the epaulets on the jersey work at all.

I also don't know what to make of the senator's eyes. I'm used to red eyes by now, but black? If it wasn't for the tiny grey dot which presumably represents the pupil, I'd say it looked like someone had gouged his eyes out. Actually, I'm going to say that anyway. And it doesn't work for that reason, because I don't know many hockey players who have both their eyes gouged out. I do have my suspicions about a couple of referees, though.

The last thing I'd like to draw your attention to is his left hand. Look carefully at where the inside of the sleeve, where the arm is. Or perhaps I should say where the arm should be. It isn't there. Given the location of the glove, it doesn't make sense to say the arm is hidden from view unless it's thinner than Popeye's upper arms. In other words, the most likely explanation is that this is a ghost glove.

Ghost glove, gouged-out eyes. This is actually a fairly grisly logo when you start thinking about it. Now I find myself worried about the teeth. I can't see anything wrong with them, but I know something's there. By now it's firmly established that this is some form of supernatural demon, and while I'm not an expert demonologist, I'm fairly certain that one of the rules of demonology is that demons don't have normal teeth. And the fact that they look normal just makes it creepier. It's sort of like the way the things you can't see are scarier than the ones you can. Except that can see it this time. Except that you can't. Or something like that.

Scoring Note: Most teams simply have a name that isn't specifically appropriate to their location. Since "Senators" is specifically inappropriate to their location, I'm turning the "Local" bonus into a penalty for this team.

Final Score: 70 points.
Penalties: Cartoon, 17 pts; Name-logo, 2 pts; Equip-logo (quadruply-egregious), 25 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; Offspring, 5 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts; Local-as-Penalty, 3 pts. Bonuses: None.