Sacramento River Cats

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I must admit that when I first heard "Sacramento River Cats" my immediate thought was "There's a river in Sacramento?" Not in the sense of "How could there possibly be a river in Sacramento?" I know that not the entire state of California is a desert. But I know a fair amount of it is, and I don't have the best handle on which part is desert and which part isn't, and I'm not really sure where Sacramento is anyway. So it was more in the sense of "Oh, so Sacramento's in that part of California?"

I'm sure anyone from California who's reading this is thinking, "Seriously?" Yeah, seriously. Come on, how well do you know the geography of other states? Do you know whether there's a river in other state capitals? Is there a river in Raleigh, North Carolina? Or Portland, Maine? Or Louisville, Kentucky? Heck, did you even notice that two of the three "capitals" I just listed aren't actually capitals? Lay off a little. At least I can find the United States on a world map. Roughly 106% of Americans can't do that, and an even higher percentage don't understand fractions.

So I'm guessing most of my readers aren't that familiar with Sacramento. And some of you may have had your interest piqued by the discovery that there's a river in Sacramento (I can't be the only person who didn't know that) to want to know more. As it turns out, there's not just one river in Sacramento but two. The first one has the rather unimaginative name "Sacramento River". (To be fair, I'm guessing the city is named after the river, which means it's the city that's unimaginatively named.) The other is called the American River. What surprises me most about this is that the name was still available by the time we had made our way to California. Not that anyone actually cares about duplicating river names, of course (there are three North Rivers just in the state of Virginia), but the name "American River" is surprisingly rare. Wikipedia lists only three American Rivers, and one of them is a town in Australia. There's no river called the American River in the town of American River; in fact, there's not a river at all. Damn Australians. Even stranger, the town of American River was so named before either of the actual rivers named American River. I really don't understand Australians at all.

The other American River is in Washington (state), and is apparently named after the American River in California, which makes California's American River the first actual river to get that name. California's American River got that name way back when California was still a part of New Spain (the original name was Rio de los Americanos, and it was later anglicized), so the first river to be called the "American River" wasn't actually an American river at the time it got that name. Apparently I need to quit making fun of the Australians.

All right, that explains why the team name has the word "River" in it. But why River Cats? Is a river cat an actual thing? Am I about to learn about a creature as fascinating as the fisher cat? No. The Oxford English Dictionary does have an entry for "river cat"; it's a regional name for catfish. And there are catfish in the Sacramento River (they're not native, but were introduced some time in the 19th Century). But apparently that has nothing to do with the Sacramento baseball team's name. Paul Caputo at Chris Creamer's sportslogos.net asked the team's coordinator of media relations that question, and got the answer "I don't think the cats has any real tie to anything." Apparently the team let people suggest names, and they liked that one. Um, okay.

The name "River Cats" is nothing special, but it does flow reasonably well when spoken. On the other hand, a three-syllable nickname after a four-syllable city name is a bit long. As for the logo...ho-hum. A typical JACKAL* holding a baseball. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a baseball player getting ready to throw the ball or just a typical cat playing with a ball that happens to be a baseball, but it's nothing special either way. Then again, a town in Australia with no river being named American River is something special, so maybe specialness is overrated.

* Just Another Crappy Kartoon Animal Logo

NOTE: I had to improvise a bit with the scoring. Since a river cat is a real thing but the team may not have known that when they settled on the name, I've giving them a half penalty for that. Since I'm not sure whether the cat is supposed to be a player or not, I'm giving them a half-penalty for "Equipment" and a half-penalty for "Player" (essentially averaging the penalty they'd get if the cat is a player and the penalty they'd get if it isn't). Finally, if you look closely you can see bits of water in the logo, which earns them the "Scenery" penalty.

Final Score: 114 points.
Penalties: Compound (half-penalty), 17 pts; Script, 7 pts; Scenery, 11 pts; Equipment (half-penalty), 6½ pts; Cartoon, 47 pts, Player (half-penalty), 25½ pts.
Bonuses: None.