Fresno Grizzlies

-1

If you're ever in need of a laugh, an easy way to find one is to pick a random city with a baseball team and do a search (Wikipedia and Baseball Reference are both good places to look) to find out the names of old teams in that city. There are few if any cities that have baseball now that didn't have baseball back in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and different approaches to naming teams means you've got a good shot of finding a real doozy. To give you an idea, the closest team to me is the Carolina Mudcats, who play in Zebulon. And looking for old teams in Zebulon, I find that...oh, yeah. Zebulon is one of those rare exceptions; the Mudcats were the first team that town has ever had. Okay, so let's go to the second-closest team to me today, which is the Durham Bulls. Bulls is a solid name, but if you go back and look at their early teams you wind up with such gems as...oh, right. The Durham Bulls name goes all the way back to 1900; there have been only four seasons that a team in Durham had any other name, and two of those four they simply used the affiliates' name.

I'm not doing a good job of proving how well this works, am I?

But it does work pretty well with Fresno. Fresno's first team whose name is known (there was an earlier team, but the records only refer to it as "Fresno" with no nickname) was the Fresno Raisin Eaters, who played in the Pacific Coast League in 1906. As references to local industry go, it's all right, but overall it's a terrible name. The main problem, I think, is that raisin eater sounds like either an epithet or a euphemism. Maybe both. Anyway, the Raisin Eaters only lasted a single season, but after a one-year hiatus baseball returned to the city in the form of the Fresno Tigers of the California State League. Not a bad name, right? But they only used that name for the 1908 season, choosing in 1909 to become the Fresno Raisin Growers. That name (thankfully) only lasted one season as well; in 1910 they were once again the Fresno Tigers. Then they folded, and Fresno went without a team for two years, at which point they got a team called the Fresno Packers. Yes, this was another reference to raisins, although they at least had the decency to not call themselves the Fresno Raisin Packers (which sounds even worse than Raisin Eaters). Guess what happened at the end of the season? Yep, they changed their name to the Fresno Tigers as well, and after a season as the third incarnation of the Fresno Tigers they folded and the city didn't get another team until the 1940s.

From the above paragraph we can see three things. One, the teams were all indecisive as hell about what to call themselves. Two, the problem seems to have been that they wanted a name with local color but every such name they thought of sucked. Three, the lousy names were the least of their worries, since they never went more than three consecutive years with baseball.

Fortunately, in later years baseball in Fresno got its shit together. Baseball returned to Fresno in 1946 and stayed for over four decades. For all but two seasons the team simply used its affiliate name, which was either the Cardinals or the Giants. Not terribly original, but certainly serviceable, and a damned sight better than Raisin Eaters. The other two years were 1957, when they had no major league affiliation and called themselves the Fresno Sun Sox, and 1988, when they once again had no affiliate called themselves the Fresno Suns. 1988 was, incidentally, the end of the run for that team in Fresno; after finishing in last place (it's not easy being an unaffiliated baseball team in an affiliated league) the team was sold and moved to Salinas where, ironically, they regained the Giants affiliation they had lost at the end of the 1987 season.

Then, in 1998, the Fresno Grizzlies came along. This is a good, solid name. And for most of the time they've had sense enough to have a logo featuring a bear that doesn't try to look cute the way some teams try to do. The current logo is a good example. The bear is certainly stylized somewhat, but there's nothing cute or cartoony about it. The red outline is a bit of an odd color to pair with brown, but it does have the benefit of suggesting blood, especially around the claws. Then you've got the slashes that make it look like the logo itself has been slashed by a bear. That's a nice touch.

In short, this is a no-nonsense name and a no-nonsense logo. Good for them. If only the teams in the early Twentieth Century could have some up with names like this, they just might have lasted to see a fourth season.

Final Score: -1 point.
Penalties: Diamond (half-penalty...note the right side of the logo), 8 pts;
Bonuses: Graphic, -9 pts.