Hartford Yard Goats

13

Some cities have their own unofficial sports colors. Pittsburgh, for example, has black and yellow: the Pirates' colors are black and yellow, the Steelers' colors are black and yellow, the Penguins' colors are black and yellow, and even their minor league teams (the USL Riverhounds and the ABA Yellow Jackets) use black and yellow as their colors. Although the NFL Commanders have always been an exception, most teams in Washington have used red, white, and blue as their colors for most of their existence. It's not a common thing; in most cities with multiple teams, each team has its own color scheme. But a handful of cities do seem to have this approach.

For whatever reasons, Hartford is turning into one of those cities. The Hartford Yard Goats' colors are green and blue. Hartford Athletic, the city's USL team, also uses green and blue. Hartford City, the city's NPSL team, doesn't use green and blue as its primary scheme but does use it as their secondary colors (in the NPSL, like most European football leagues, secondary jerseys don't have to be white, they just have to be a color strongly contrasting with their primaries). Not every team in Hartford does this: the AHL Wolf Pack uses red, blue, and silver, while the Hartford Wanderers of USA Rugby use the slightly different scheme of green and black. But the pattern is clear.

Of course, anyone familiar with the NHL knows what's going on here: green and blue was the color scheme the Hartford Whalers used from 1979 (the year they joined the NHL) until 1997 (the year they relocated to North Carolina). For some reason, now everyone in Hartford wants to hearken back to the Whalers. On the one hand, I think it's kind of neat when all the teams in town are this coordinated, and I also think green and blue is a neat color scheme that doesn't get used nearly enough. On the other, there's just something kind of sad about this. Hartford is unlikely to ever get another major league team, and I'm sure they know it. There's an argument to be made here that the city should just accept this and move on. It's interesting to note that the Wolf Pack, the one team that would have the most justification in doing this, isn't doing this. Maybe they're onto something.

As for the Yard Goats name, it's not quite as ridiculous as it seems at first glance (although it is rather ridiculous). Dunkin' Donuts Park, where the Yard Goats play, is near Hartford Yard, a railroad classification yard (look it up, I don't feel like explaining). Yard Goat is a slang term for one of the locomotives used by classification yards to move cars from one track to another. The team decided to use a goat rather than a yard goat in its logo, an odd case where they look like they've picked a more relevant logo by actually picking a less relevant logo. I can't say that I blame them, though.

The goat is eating a baseball bat (which is almost certainly what a goat would do with a baseball bat if you gave it one), but otherwise the logo is devoid of baseball references...another good move, in my opinion. Well, it's eating a baseball bat most of the time. Once a year the team has a Whaler-themed night, and on that night the team wears special jerseys where the logo is changed so that the goat is eating a hockey stick.

Seriously, guys, just let it go.

Final Score: 13 points.
Penalties: Equipment, 13 pts.
Bonuses: None