Tri-City ValleyCats

197

The cat in this logo is the worst baseball player ever.

What's the first thing they tell you when you're learning to play baseball (or softball) as a kid? "Keep your eye on the ball." It's the most basic thing in baseball. If you don't keep your eye on the ball, you'll never hit the ball. If you don't keep your eye on the ball, you'll get hit by the ball. If you don't keep your eye on the ball, evil clowns* will kidnap you in your sleep and feed you to the capybaras for their personal amusement. Keep your eye on the ball as if your life depends on it.

This cat will be lucky if he even notices the ball out of the corner of his eye before the evil clowns get to him. From the way he's holding the bat, it's clear that the pitcher is to his right (i.e., where the viewer is). And where is he looking? Into the dugout. And he's not just glancing into it. No, he's glaring at something in there. Is there a player in the dugout distracting him with one of those feathers tied to the end of a string that are sold as cat toys? Because my cat definitely glares like that at those cat toys. If my cat was a baseball player then she'd definitely be looking into the dugout if one of those cat toys were in there. She wouldn't care about the baseball at all. She wouldn't care about the baseball in the first place. She's a cat. She prefers tennis.

The dugout where the player is distracting the cat, incidentally, is probably somewhere in northwestern Massachusetts given the scale implied the the hills he towers over. The hills in that area can be about 400 feet tall. Note that they don't reach even from his belt to his shoulder. I'm going to make a scientific wild-assed guess here and say he's somewhere in the neighborhood of half a mile tall. That means he's likely standing in a pit that's a little more than a quarter of a mile deep. For comparison purposes, Niagara Falls is roughly 1/32 of a mile in height. You may not realize it, but when you look at this logo, you're looking at evidence of what ought to be considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world: The Pit of the Hudson.

Indeed, if this logo depicted a historical event, it would be the most epic sporting event ever. A baseball field roughly the size of Rhode Island, featuring anthropomorphic animals half a mile high, with random pits a quarter-mile deep placed around the field. Tell me you wouldn't want to experience such a game if it existed. Actually, it doesn't matter whether you'd want to experience a game: you would. Every time a player had a hit, his run toward first base would register 8.2 on the Richter scale. You'd feel it anywhere east of the Mississippi River.

Of course, no one has ever experienced this game, right? I mean, how could they? Well, I'm not saying this is definitely what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out the artist who drew this was drawing something he actually saw. I'd guess it was in 1967, and he was standing just beyond the home run wall near center field. That would put him in a small town in New York known as Woodstock. I think it's a plausible explanation. You can draw your own conclusions.

* Is there any other kind?

Final Score: 197 points.
Penalties: Region, 8 pts; Software, 27 pts; Compound, 34 pts; Humanoid, 30 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Player, 51 pts. Bonuses: None.