Hudson Valley Renegades

85

It seems to be inevitable in sports that names for regional leagues make less and less sense as time goes on. I've commented on it before with the American Hockey League (at least one team outside the United States since 1969), Southern Professional Hockey League (four teams in Indiana and Illinois), and the ECHL, which at least had the decency to officially drop the "East Coast Hockey League" name and make its former initials its official name when it expanded to include teams as far west as Alaska. But it happens in baseball, too. A good example would be the South Atlantic League, added a New Jersey-based team back in 2001 and now has a couple of teams in New York state. One of those teams is the Hudson Valley Renegades. The Renegades, along with the SAL's other New York team (the Brooklyn Cyclones), joined as part of Minor League Baseball's reorganization a couple of years ago; they had previously played in the now-defunct New York-Penn League.

The Renegades used the fact that they were in a new league as an opportunity to debut a new logo. Quite frankly, it's an utter snoozefest. Previous logos had featured a raccoon in the logo. Technically raccoons have nothing to do with renegades, but the way their coloring makes them look like little bandits makes it one of the more understandable uses of an unrelated animal in the logo. The new logo features...a bridge. Presumably there's a specific bridge that it's supposed to look like, but it's not really that distinct looking and I found a couple of bridges in the area that it could be intended to represent, which as far as I'm concerned means it doesn't really represent any of them very well. The general shape of the logo is that of a home plate, because someone was under the mistaken impression that doing so would be clever. And just in case the home-plate shape wasn't enough of a cliché, they stuck a baseball at the bottom of the logo.

I'd ask if it would kill them to include an actual renegade in a logo for a team called the renegades, but clearly the answer is Yes, it would.

The thing is, the team shouldn't be called the Renegades in the first place. It's too generic. It has to relation to the area. And there is such a rich vein to be mined here. The Renegades play in the town of Fishkill, New York. Fishkill! Don't tell me that doesn't have serious potential. Okay, maybe "serious potential" isn't quite right. "Silly potential" is more like it. If I were running this team, they would be changing their name to the Fish Kill Killer Fish. And I'd make damn certain the logo was worthy of such a ridiculous name. I'm not precisely certain what it would be, but the first thought that comes to mind is an anthropomorphized fish drawn to look like Rambo, only more violent.

But instead, we get the Hudson Valley Renegades, and we get a stupid bridge. Yeah, sure, it could probably be worse. But it could be so, so much better. Indeed, making it worse would probably make it better. That's how boring this logo is. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take a nap, because this logo is making me drowsy.

Final Score: 85 points.
Penalties: Region, 8 pts; Scenery, 11 pts; Equipment (egregious), 27 pts; Irrelevance, 39 pts.
Bonuses: None.