Columbus Clippers

23

I don't know a great deal about maritime subjects. But between having grown up in the state that has a bay effectively cutting it in half and having a wife who used to live on the coast and is very fond of boating, I have managed to pick up a few tidbits of information. One of those tidbits is that ocean-going vessels rarely travel over a thousand miles up a river. This is exactly what a clipper ship would have to do in order to get to Columbus, Ohio.

I'd like to give a more exact measurement than just "over one thousand", but that's the best I could do. Google Maps has expanded its options over the years, but for some reason it hasn't seen fit to put water travel as an option. So I can tell you that it's 912 miles and 14 3/4 hours if you drive from Columbus to New Orleans, 992 miles and 3 1/2 days if you ride a bike, and even that it's 917 miles and 12 1/2 days if you walk, but they don't have an option for figuring out the distance/time it would take to take a boat down the Scioto, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers. This seems like a stunning oversight to me. I realize that not a lot of people are going to do that, but surely more people are going to take a boat between Columbus and New Orleans than are going to walk between them, right? There's also nowhere else on the web that you can get these sort of directions. Given all the completely useless crap on the web, it surprises me that this piece of information, which might actually conceivably come in handy for someone, is not available. Maybe the internet was getting full and they removed it to make room for more porn. Anyway, the best I could do for finding the river distance from the mouth of the Mississippi to Columbus was to make driving directions from Boothville-Venice LA to Columbus OH, with a bunch of via points along the way to make the car follow the path of the rivers as closely as possible. This gave me a figure of 1,295 miles, but who knows how accurate it is? "Over a thousand" is the best I can do. If you're that curious, take a boat down to Louisiana and try it yourself. If I happen to be in Columbus that day I'll even by you a beer when you arrive. But I live three states away from Ohio, so you'll probably have to buy your own damn beer.

Given the improbability of a clipper ever making its way to Columbus, I have no idea where the name "Columbus Clippers" comes from. The name defies logic. Sometimes you get weird names like these because a team moves and keeps its old nickname even though it no longer makes no sense. That's how Los Angeles wound up with a team called the Lakers, Salt Lake City wound up with a team called the Jazz, and for that matter how Charlotte once wound up with a hockey team called the Clippers (they had moved to Charlotte from Baltimore). But as best as I can determine, the Columbus Clippers have always been in Columbus. "Clipping" isn't a baseball term, as best as I can tell. Nor does the word have any non-boat meaning other than someone or something who clips. There's simply no meaningful explanation to this name that ties it to the city of Columbus.

It's kind of a shame, because I like the name when it's used in an appropriate city, and the logo they use is a great logo for the name. It's got a clipper, some water (clearly ocean water if the size of those waves are to believed), and the name of the team. That's hard to argue with. They even do a good job of being somewhat traditional without overdoing it by putting the word "Clippers" in a script that is clearly a cursive script but just as clearly is not the standard "baseball script" so many teams use. There are no gratuitous baseball references; this team is secure enough in its identity to feel that you don't need to be told what sport they play. I can think of absolutely nothing negative to say about the logo.

But the name really should be in Baltimore, Norfolk, or Boston. It has no business being in Ohio.

Final Score: 23 points.
Penalties: Alliteration, 5 pts; Letter, 24 pts; Local-as-Penalty, 6 pts.
Bonuses: Logo, -12 pts.