Bradenton Marauders

17

Last week I reviewed the Bristol Pirates. A fair amount of the time was spent discussing how lame it is that all of the Appalachian League team use their parent team's name and almost all of them use their parent team's logo. This week I'm reviewing a logo for a team from the Florida State League, which used to be almost as bad. In 1993, eleven out of twelve teams in the FSL were using their parent team's name. Today, that number is down to four-and-a-half (the Lakeland Flying Tigers are affilaited with Detroit). It's a massive improvement, which gives me hope that one day the Appalachian League will get out of its rut, too.

Most of the FSL teams that don't use their parent team's name simply forge their own identity, picking a nickname that has nothing at all to do with the parent. There's no way to tell from the name that the Brevard County Manatees are affiliated with the Milwaukee Brewers, or the Fort Myers Miracle with the Minnesota Twins, or the Charlotte Stone Crabs with the Tampa Bay Rays. But Bradenton's team takes a different approach. Their affiliate is the Pittsburgh Pirates, and it's not hard to see the relation between marauders and pirates (and the logo drives the point home). The Marauders are in fact owned by Pittsburgh, so this is a deliberate attempt to pay homage to the parent team without using their name. A couple of other teams in various sports have done similar things: the Los Angeles Kings either own or once owned the Manchester Monarchs and the Reading Royals; the Philadelphia 76ers' D-League team is the Delaware 87ers (Delaware was the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, and did so in 1787).

Personally, I kind of like this approach. In general I prefer just letting the team have its own identity, but I can understand that when a major-league owns a minor-league team, it might want the team it owns to have some reference back to the parent team. Using variations on the name is a good way to do this. Getting back to last week's review, the obvious thing to do would be to call the team the Bristol Buccaneers. Coming back to the FSL to deal with the remaining holdouts, maybe the Tampa Yankees could become the Tampa Snowbirds and the Dunedin Blue Jays could become the Dunedin Scrub Jays. The St. Lucie Mets and Palm Beach Cardinals are left as an exercise to the reader, which is another way of saying I can't think of anything.

As I said a paragraph or two ago, the logo drives home the fact that the Marauders are affiliated with the Pirates. The team colors are the same as Pittsburgh's. And of course, there's a pirate in the logo. The pirate in the logo even has a pair of crossed bats on his hat, which is a motif that the Pirates have used off and on for the past eighty years or so. The logos from the late 1930s through the 1950s had the crossed bats on their hat just like the Marauders' pirate, as did the Pirates' logo in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since the mid-1990s the crossed bats haven't appeared on the pirate's hat in Pittsburgh's logo (largely because the pirate isn't wearing a hat), but they're still part of any Pittsburgh Pirates logo that includes the pirate.

All of this contributes to the Marauders logo being a good one. But even if you ignore all of that, there's the simple fact that this is a well-drawn pirate. The toothy grin is perhaps a bit much, but overall this is a pirate who looks intimidating as he stares straight at you. He's not cutesy, but more importantly, he's not drawn to look so tough that in the end he winds up looking silly instead.

It's just a very good logo to go with a very good name. I think that every minor league team that currently uses its parent team's name and logo would do well to look at this example and learn from it.

Final Score: 17 points.
Penalties: Offspring, 12 pts; Equipment (egregious), 27 pts.
Bonuses: Name, -10 pts; Logo, -12 pts.