Great Lakes Loons

249

This team is going to get hammered on the "Region" penalty, and they deserve every point they get and then some. It's not just the fact that "Great Lakes" is a huge region (forget "multi-state", this one's international). It's also the fact that a team in the Midwest League decided to call themselves "Great Lakes". The terms "Midwest" and "Great Lakes" aren't quite synonymous, but the overlap is huge. It would be like having a team in the Eastern League whose geographic identifier was "New England". Or maybe even like having a team in the National Hockey League whose geographic identifer was "United States". The Midwest League has sixteen teams, and eleven of them are in a state that touches one or more of the Great Lakes. If you were to draw on the face of the earth the smallest circle you could that includes all of the Great Lakes, it would include every team in the league with the possible exception of Bowling Green. And this is not some name dating back four hundred years or anything like that. The team moved to its current home (Midland, Michigan) in 2007. There is simply no excuse for this. Indeed, I'm sitting here trying to figure out just how many egregious penalties the team gets. I think it's thirteen. I'd wonder what the term for this is (i.e., doubly, triply, et cetera...what is the equivalent for thirteen times), but oddly enough, this is not the first time I've had a penalty earn thirteen egregious penalties, so I already know the answer.

Midland is part of the Tri-Cities region of Michigan, and here we may be getting into an explanation of why the team chose to go by "Great Lakes". Apparently, in recent years the people of the Tri-Cities, Michigan region have decided that Tri-Cities is a bit generic. They have a point: There's also a Tri-Cities in Tennessee, a Tri-Cities in Illinois, a Tri-Cities in Nebraska, a Tri-Cities in Oklahoma, a Tri-Cities in Washington, a Tri-City in Oregon, and two different Tri-Cities in California. In a search for a new moniker for the region, they seem to be settling on "Great Lakes Bay". There's a problem here, though, which is that the bay that these cities are near isn't called Great Lakes Bay (probably because that would be an idiotic name, along the lines of calling the Gulf of Mexico the "Atlantic Gulf"). It's called Saginaw Bay. And in any case, the team isn't the Great Lakes Bay Loons, it's the Great Lakes Loons. So even if I was inclined to be forgiving had they used "Great Lakes Bay" (which I probably was not), I'm definitely not inclined to be forgiving here.

The logo is no great shakes, either. The loon itself is a reasonable facsimile of an actual loon (all the colors are accurate, for example...yes, loons' eyes really are red and their beaks really are grey). But there's something amateurish-looking about the drawing. It's not quite bad, but it's not quite good, either. Then the word "Loons" is written in what looks like a font which tries to mimic standard baseball script but fails. Completing the look is the phrase "Great Lakes" written in what looks like the font that Macintosh computers had back in the 80s.

It's still a better logo than they deserve, though. I mean, they've got some serious bad karma to burn off for that "Great Lakes" bit, and this isn't going to cut it.

Final Score: 249 points.
Penalties: Region (tredecaply-egregious), 203 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Script, 7 pts; Humanoid (because of the smile), 30 pts; Name, 10 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -6 pts.