Down East Bird Dawgs

104

NOTE: This review incorporates text from the review for the Down East Wood Ducks, which was posted 2022 July 4.

Kinston, North Carolina has had minor league baseball for most of the past century, and for most of that time, the teams quite reasonably used Kinston as their locative. Part of this is because the idea of using regional locatives like "Roanoke Valley" or "Delmarva" for sports teams doesn't go back a century (I admit I didn't exactly research this extensively, but the earliest I'm aware of is from the 1960s). The other part is that it just wouldn't have made sense with the minor league baseball landscape for most of the time Kinston had teams. For much of the time Kinston had minor league baseball there were also teams in Goldsboro (about 20 miles/35 km away), Wilson (35 miles/60 km), and/or Greenville (25 miles/40 km). All of these are in the "Down East" area (maybe...more on this in a bit), so for a Kinston team to call itself "Down East" would have made no sense. But when the Texas Rangers put a team in Kinston in 2017, there were no longer minor league teams in these other Down East cities, so they decided they'd go with the name Down East Wood Ducks rather than Kinston Wood Ducks.

This didn't entirely make sense in my opinion. The other cities might have no longer had minor league teams, but they did have collegiate league teams. Also, there were apparently arguments over whether Kinston was truly part of the region known as Down East.

This last bit was news to me. I lived in the area for part of my childhood, and as I understood it, the area was basically synonymous with the Greenville NC-Washington NC-New Bern NC television market. It's certainly the term used by those TV stations to refer to their viewing area. But to some people it's apparently a smaller area than that, and Kinston is most assuredly not a part of that smaller area. There were complaints when the Down East Wood Ducks name was announced, partly because of the whole Down East thing.

Honestly, that seems like a silly thing to get bent out of shape over. That's the problem with so many people. So many people get so hung up over such little things. First you've got the language peevers (the world is not going to end if I say "laid" instead of "lay"). Then you've got the people who get hung up over little shit like whether a particular city is part of a particular area. And somewhere out there, there's probably some asshole who gets so bent out of shape about team logos that he's created an entire website dedicated to bitching about the ones he doesn't like. What is wrong with these people, anyway?

Anyway, the Wood Ducks either folded or relocated to Hickory, North Carolina or relocated to Spartanburg, South Carolina (a case can be made for any of these and I don't feel like getting into it) at the end of the 2024 season. It looked like the end of baseball in Kinston, but this year a new team in the Frontier League is debuting there. And the Down East locative is back. Never mind the fact that Greenville and Morehead City still have collegiate league teams. Also, never mind the fact that Wilson has a minor league team debuting this year as well. The new team decided to stick with the Down East locative. Okay, whatever.

The team is also sticking with a hunting-themed name, this time going with Bird Dawgs. For the record, I don't think hunting is really any bigger in the Kinston area than it is in most of the U.S., so I'm not sure why we've got this run of hunting-themed team names all of a sudden. Then again, I've spent a fair amount of time in Kinston, and if I'm honest I'm not sure what else to name a team in that city after. I'm also not sure why the team spells it Bird Dawgs instead of Bird Dogs. I don't recall the Eastern North Carolina accent pronouncing dog with an "aw" sound instead of an "ah" sound. I suppose I could check with my parents, both of whom have Eastern North Carolina accents, but I'd feel a little weird calling my parents just to ask them to pronounce the word dog for me.

Anyway, on to the logo. The logo is a bird daw— er, dog. We know this because it has a bird in its mouth. I'm sure the dog's a good boy or girl, because all dogs are either good boys or good girls, with the possible exception of chihuahuas. The dog has a no-nonsense expression on its face, and is looking at the viewer head-on. It's a good logo as long as you aren't freaked out by the idea of a dog holding a bird in its mouth. I'm not quite so crazy about the baseball field in the background, but it needed something back there.

So all in all, the team has made a couple of odd choices with its name but no truly bad choices, and I don't have anything bad to say about the logo. Which is good, because I wouldn't want to be like that asshole who creates an entire website just to bitch about logos he doesn't like. What is wrong with that guy, anyway?

Final Score: 104 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 17 pts; Misspell, 29 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Script, 7 pts; Diamond, 16 pts; Humanoid (the eyes), 30 pts.
Bonuses: None.