Acereros del Norte

48

NOTE: This review incorporates text from the previous review of this team, which was posted on 2011 May 29

When I wrote my first review for this team way back in 2011, I commented on the fact that there seemed to be some confusion over whether the team's name was "los Acereros de Monclova" or "los Acereros del Norte". The team website used the former; the league website the latter; the logo managed to jam both "Monclova" and "del Norte" in. At the time I just spent a paragraph describing the confusion, but this time I wanted to actually figure it out. Well, I found out. It's both, of course.

The team was founded in 1980 as los Acereros de Monclova. In 1992 a new ownership group bought it, and rebranded the team los Acereros del Norte. I'm not certain why. The obvious reason would be some marketing decision so they could claim the entire northern part of the country if they did this, but there were other nearby teams at the time, including two that were farther north than Monclova. In any case, somewhere along the way — I couldn't find precisely when — the team switched back to los Acereros de Monclova for branding purposes. Today all references to the team which are under the team's control say "Monclova" — that's what their away jerseys say, it's what the team website says, it's how the team's Facebook and Twitter pages are named. But apparently the team never actually got around to officially changing their name back, so los Acereros del Norte is still the official name. The league website shows official names, so they show "los Acereros del Norte" rather than the name the team actually uses.

This sort of thing isn't completely unheard of elsewhere, but it's fairly rare. The only other example I'm aware of is that the actual name of the team commonly known as "les Canadiens de Montréal" is "le Club de hockey Canadien". There's probably one or two others out there for me to find if I feel like looking up detailed info about several hundreds organizations. I don't.

Having gotten that out of the way, let's look at the name "Acereros". "-ero" is a suffix in Spanish that means "maker of", and acero is the Spanish word for steel. So acerero means "steelmaker" or, more loosely, "steeler". Monclova is a bit like Pittsburgh, you see. It's known as the Steel Capital in Mexico, and more steel is produced in Monclova than anywhere else in Mexico. This last part means that Monclova isn't actually like Pittsburgh after all, because Pittsburgh is where more steel was produced than anywhere else in the United States. Today there's as much steel production in Antarctica as there is in Pittsburgh, because there isn't any steel production in Pittsburgh anymore. None. (In fairness, there is some production in other cities just outside Pittsburgh.) As best as I can determine, the center of steel production in the United States today is Gary, Indiana. Is Gary's baseball team named after steel? No, it's named after a commuter train. But let's not worry about them right now.

In any case, los Acereros de Monclova face the same problem that the Pittsburgh Steelers do, which is that it's not easy to come up with a logo for a team called the "Steelers". In the Steelers' case, they solved it by adapting the logo from the American Iron and Steel Institute. There is a Mexican equivalent to the American Iron and Steel Institute (la Cámara Nacional de la Industria del Hierro y del Acero, or Canacero for short...their logo is to the right), but los Acereros didn't go that route, choosing instead to go with a simple A. And by "simple", I mean "boring". I guess it's relatively interesting as representations of the letter A go, but even the most interesting representation of an A isn't going to be that interesting because...well, because it's just a letter A.

Admittedly, los Acereros are far from the only baseball team whose logo is just a letter. There are at least half a dozen major league teams who do the same thing, plus several other Liga Mexicana teams. But looking at those other teams brings up another issue, which is this team isn't even using the right letter. Most of those other teams use the letter for the geographic portion of the name. The Cleveland Indians' logo is a C, not an I. The Detroit Tigers have a D, not a T. The Philadelphia Phillies have a...never mind. So if this team is going to have a letter for its logo, it should be an M.

Wait? Is that right? Should it be an M or an N? Oh, forget it. They just need to pick another logo.

Final Score: 48 points.
Penalties: Region, 4 pts; Ers (or at least its Spanish equivalent), 26 pts; Letter, 24 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -6 pts.