Frederick Keys

59

If I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that this name has grown on me just in the short time I've been working on this review.

First, let's just talk about the sound of the team name. At first I thought it was dumb. Who names a team after the little piece of metal you use to open a lock? I was toying with making a joke about "I've got keys, which jingle jangle jingle". But I eventually saw the elegance in the name. It's three simple sounds: a nice, sharp /k/ to start the name off with a punch, followed by an /i/ and a nice, soft /z/ to end it. It's the verbal equivalent of a logo made out of a couple of simple elements, like Mercedes or Nike or CBS. Logos like that may have a meaning or may be meaningless, but either way they make an impact. Sports has some names like that, too. Consider "Mets", for example. Yes, "Mets" is short for "Metropolitans", but nobody actually thinks of it that way. "Mets" is simply a short, memorable name for a team. A similar principle explains why names like "Reds" and "Cubs" work as well as they do despite the fact that if you actually think about them, the image they conjure isn't actually compelling. The image doesn't need to be compelling, because the very sound of the word is. The same can be said of a lot of nicknames for teams, from baseball's O's to football's Bucs to hockey's Habs.

Adding to this is the actual origin of the name, which is quite clever. The team is named after Francis Scott Key. You may not know this (I didn't), but Key was born in Frederick. And he is famous for what he did in Baltimore. Have I mentioned yet that the Keys are a single-A farm team for the Orioles? In other words, the players are hoping to do what Francis Scott Key did: start off in Frederick and go on to find fame in Baltimore. I like that.

And by now the logo should make sense to you in a way that it probably didn't before. Why does a team named after lock-openers have fireworks in the logo? Because the team isn't named after lock-openers, and because those aren't actually fireworks so much as they are emblems of "the rockets' red glare". Yes, I know the glare in the logo isn't actually red. Don't overthink it. That's my job.

That's not to say there aren't some problems with the logo. Do we really need the baseballs? Do we really need the word "baseball" for that matter?. But it's a nice way of representing the person the team is named after while again working a reference to Baltimore in. There's a lot of subtle cleverness in all of this. I wish more teams could do the same.

Final Score: 59 points.
Penalties: Equipment (doubly egregious), 42 pts; Diamond, 16 pts; Obvious, 17 pts.
Bonuses: Name, -10 pts; Local, -6 pts.