Quad City River Bandits

116

I've written several reviews for teams in the Quad City over the years; this is the first one for a baseball team but I've done four for hockey teams there. And it occurs to me that I've never explained just where Quad City is. Some of you already know and some of you don't care, but I'm just going to ask people in those two groups to humor me while I explain it to everyone else. Or you can just skip a few paragraphs if it bothers you that much.

First I should probably explain why I keep saying "Quad City" when the team is called the Quad Cities River Bandits. Blame the hockey teams for that one. They've all styled themselves as "Quad City" rather than "Quad Cities". Which is correct? As best as I can determine, both. The local convention center is the Quad Cities Waterfront Convention Center; the local botanical center is the Quad City Botanical Center. The local orchestra is the Quad City Symphony Orchestra; the local ballet is Ballet Quad Cities. And the basketball team that used to play in the area was the Tri-Cities Bla— wait a second.

Yes, the basketball team was the Tri-Cities Blackhawks (we'll get to this in a bit). This was, believe it or not, an NBA team (they would eventually become today's Atlanta Hawks), and that's not the only major league team the region has ever had. Back in the 1920s the Rock Island Independents played in the NFL (that team folded in 1926). I'm not sure to what extent that shows that the Quad City area used to be more important than it is today and to what extent that shows that the NBA and NFL used to be less important than they are today, but there you have it.

Oh, right. I still haven't actually said where Quad City is.

Quad City is a collection of cities on the Illinois-Iowa border, also known as the Mississippi River. As the "Quad Cities" name and the earlier "Tri-Cities" name imply, the actual number of cities in the region is five. On the Iowa side you have Davenport (the largest city today) and Bettendorf, and on the Illinois side you have Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline. Apparently the original "Tri-Cities" were Davenport, Rock Island, and Moline, and as East Moline grew the region became the "Quad Cities". (This happened a couple of decades before the NBA team used the "Tri-Cities" name, incidentally.) Eventually Bettendorf grew to the point that it was bigger than East Moline, and some people (plus a local TV station) tried pushing the name "Quint Cities", but that never really caught on.

The River Bandits play in Davenport, and the stadium is located right on the river. The stadium is aligned such that a home run which is hit into center or right field stands a good chance of ending up in the Mississippi. Does this mean a home run might literally travel into the next state? Alas, no. The Mississippi isn't exactly a narrow river, after all, and the state boundary runs down the middle of it. The distance from home plate to the state line is somewhere around 450m (1,500 ft) from home plate, so to hit a home run that far you'd have to hit the ball nearly three times as far as the longest recorded home run ever. Even if someone, somewhere did manage to hit the ball that far, it probably wouldn't be someone playing single A. But give the team credit: short of building an artificial island, they've done everything they can.

Given the location of the stadium, it's not hard to see why they went with the name River Bandits. I couldn't find any specific references to it, but I'd be surprised if there weren't real river bandits in what is now the Quad Cities area at some point. And I suppose, given the name, it was inevitable that someone would decide to put a raccoon in the logo. I mean, god forbid we actually put a bandit in the logo, right? And of course we have to dress the raccoon up like a bandit, although I suppose I shouldn't complain too much because at least they didn't dress it up like a baseball player. Or worse yet, dress it up like a bandit but have it swinging a baseball bat. The bridge in the background is the Centennial Bridge, which is visible from the stands at the stadium where the team plays. I suppose it makes the logo a bit more balanced than if it wasn't in there. All in all the logo is fairly average in my book. I mean, it's far from the worst that's out there, but it's nothing I haven't seen dozens of times before.

Oh, well. If every team had a distinct logo, then no team would have a distinct logo, right? They built a nifty stadium, so I'll let the logo slide.

Final Score: 116 points.
Penalties: Region, 8 pts; Script, 7 pts; Scenery, 11 pts; Equipment, 13 pts; Humanoid (note the eyes), 30 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts.
Bonuses: None.