Rochester Red Wings

145

(Note: This review incorporates text from the review for the previous Rochester Red Wings, which was originally published 2010 August 1.)

Let's start by giving credit where credit is due: The Rochester Red Wings are the oldest minor league baseball team playing today. How old? So old that they debuted in the 19th Century, that's how old. That makes them older than every professional team playing in North America that you can name in any sport with only five exceptions: the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, and St. Louis Cardinals. That's impressive. The Red Wings name isn't quite so old, dating back to "only" 1929, but that still makes it an older name than hockey's Detroit Red Wings, a name that team didn't start using until 1932.

I'm not certain of this, but I suspect the name can be traced back to the famous Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869. For those who don't know (although I'm not sure how any regular readers of this website can avoid knowing, given how many times I've mentioned them over the years), the Cincinnati Red Stockings are the ultimate origin of multiple team names in baseball, including today's Cincinnati Reds (not the same team), Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox (and every other "Sox" team out there), and probably even the Seattle Mariners if I can only figure out how. Anyway, my theory is this. When Rochester's team first chose that name (it had previously been the Rochester Tribe, incidentally, and earlier names had been Colts, Hustlers, and Bronchos), they were affiliated with the St. Louis Cardinals. It's not hard to imagine why a team affiliated with the Cardinals would be called the Red Wings (remember, today's Cardinals affiliate is the Memphis Redbirds). And the supposed origin of the Cardinals name is that a fan of the St. Louis Perfectos (as the team was known at the time) remarked about the team's bright red stockings, "What a lovely shade of cardinal", and the owner overheard this and decided Cardinals was a better name than Perfectos. This is just conjecture on my part, but given how superstitious baseball players are it wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that the reason the Perfectos had bright red stockings was they were hoping those stocking would provide a little bit of the old Cincinnati Red Stockings mojo. That may sound ridiculous, but it's established fact that this is why the Boston Red Sox started wearing bright red stockings. Why not a similar thought process in St. Louis?

Anyway, whatever the name's origin is, it's not surprising that a team with such a name would feature a red bird in its logo. I'm not sure precisely what type of red bird it's supposed to be, though. I don't know of any bright red birds with beaks like that. I also don't know of any bright red birds with teeth, or eyes where you can see the whites. The humanlike eyes and teeth aren't there to be accurate, of course. They're there to make the bird look intimidating. They don't succeed. The bird doesn't look intimidating so much as deranged. This looks like a bird that's about three seconds away from giving in to full-blown 'roid rage, to be honest. And now that I say that, I notice that the arm looks unnaturally muscular. The last logo had similar problems, incidentally — both the 'roid-rage face and the excessive arms.

If the team is indeed using a real bird as the model for its logos, someone really needs to look into whether that bird is juicing. And if the team isn't using a real bird as the model for its logos, then they just might want to test the artist to see what they've been up to. Because one way or another, I'm fairly certain someone or something has been using something they shouldn't have been using.

Final Score: 145 points.
Penalties: Alliteration, 5 pts; Humanoid, 30 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Player, 51 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None.