Greensboro Grasshoppers

101

NOTE: This review incorporates text from the previous review for the Grasshoppers, which was posted 2009 July 18.

Baseball, having a much longer tradition of professional play than football or basketball, has a lot of teams whose nicknames developed "organically", by which I mean they are true nicknames chosen by fans or reporters and adopted by the team instead of being deliberately chosen by the team for marketing reasons. Organic names tend to be a bit more colorful for that very reason. Nobody in Brooklyn sat around and decided that "Trolley Dodgers" would be a good name for marketing purposes. Nobody in Philadelphia thought that "Phillies" would cause opponents to tremble in fear. The people in Toledo didn't think — well, based on the handful of people from Toledo that I've met, maybe they did think "Mud Hens" would be good marketing, but I can't rule out the possibility that their name was organic, as well. As a general rule, I prefer these more colorful nicknames over the slick, chosen-to-sell-T-shirts names you see in other sports such as Houston Rockets or Colorado Mammoth. So even if I find a name like "Sioux Falls Canaries" is a bit odd, I can appreciate the fact that the name has history behind it and deserves a little slack. But what to make of a name like "Greensboro Grasshoppers"? It clearly looks like one of those organic names. It clearly isn't a name deliberately chosen for its marketability. Or is it? The name has no history whatsoever; it only dates back to 2005. Simply put, any name used for the first time in the 21st Century was chosen for its marketability, even if it doesn't look like it. At first blush, it would seem that the owners were complete idiots who thought a name like "Grasshoppers" would be trendy the way that monikers like "RailCats" are. But after thinking about it, I've concluded that this is the nickname equivalent of Camden Yards: deliberately designed to evoke the quirkiness of yesteryear despite being far newer.

I have no idea what to think of this. Part of me likes it: I like a certain amount of character, and Grasshoppers is certainly a better name than RailCats. But at the same time, I feel like I'm being blatantly manipulated. I'm sure they're hoping people will think this is a quirky name which has a connection to some team that played in Greensboro back in 1904 or something. It's almost, but not quite, lying to me. Nobody appreciates being lied to. There is undeniably a certain charm in the "Grasshoppers" name, but that charm is weakened by the blatancy of it all.

The team also used to aim for that sort of charm with its logo, making use of the script that one usually only sees in logos for baseball teams and high school athletics. But they recently changed that, switching to what is presumably supposed to be the head of a grasshopper in a circle. I say "presumably" because it doesn't really look like a grasshopper's head. On one level, I dont blame them: grasshopper heads are pretty odd looking, and a more accurate drawing would be disconcerting. Clearly the team wanted the grasshopper to look cute rather than disconcerting, which meant the head couldn't be terribly accurate. But given that the head couldn't be terribly accurate, perhaps they should have had more than just the grasshopper's head in the logo. They could have gotten away with an inaccurate head if they included the rest of the body the way the previous logo did (and by the way, the head on the previous logo was more accurate), but what they did doesn't really work. The way the head is drawn, you could just as easily use it for a team named after bees or ants or just about any other insect. Okay, maybe not cockroaches. But if you're naming your team after cockroaches you've got problems that no logo is going to solve.

The antennae aren't accurate, either. Grasshopper antennae don't have those little knobs at the end of them. Butterflies antennae do. I'd say that makes the face look more like a butterfly head, but have you ever looked at a butterfly's head? Those things look weird. We're talking grasshopper-heads-look-normal-in-comparison level weird. But now that I think about it, I don't know that there are any insects with normal-looking heads. In fact I don't know that any animal has a normal-looking head when it gets right down to it. Fish heads* don't look normal. Bird heads are pretty strange looking when it gets right down to it. We tend to think mammals have normal-looking heads since theirs are the most similar to ours, but honestly, even saying mammals have normal-looking heads is pretty debatable, especially once they start having things like antlers and horns. Or huge ears, like rabbits.

Speaking of rabbits, I seem to have gone down a rabbit hole here.

In any case, the point is that a logo featuring just a grasshopper's head was bound to be a bad idea because it was either going to look inaccurate or look disturbing. Or to put it another way, it was either going to look wrong or look wrong.

Little wonder, then, that this logo...looks wrong.

* Eat them up, yum!

Final Score: 101 points.
Penalties: Alliteration (egregious), 11 pts; Equipment, 13 pts; Humanoid, 30 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts. Bonuses: None.