Tampa Bay Rays

Welcome back correspondent Chris Roberts with his review of the soon to be released Tampa Bay Rays logo. My thoughts are in the comments...

When it comes to a good logo, especially in sports, I’m almost always a huge fan of simplicity. Logos that are simple, yet classy, and convey a solid imaging really appeal to me – that’s why I’m almost always a fan of baseball logos like the Red Sox, A’s, Yankees, Dodgers, and Cubs. The logos are simple, but they aren’t so simple that a solid brand can’t be built around them.

For contrast, enter the Tampa Bay Rays.

Now before you say, “Hey, new guy at the Sports Logo Pundit, the team’s called the ‘Devil Rays,’” note that the team from the glowing orange dome is being reinvented across the board – new logo, new unis, new colors, new name. Well, not so much a new name so much as the name going on a diet and shedding six keystrokes.

I hated the old look. The color combination was horrible, and the logo always seemed too busy to me. I say that because, well, I prefer the old logo to this one.

Blue is a favorite color of mine, so points to the Rays for the new color scheme, but the logo is painfully bad for two reasons.

First, the font is a very weak choice. While this slight skewing of the Mediaeval font might look nice on a book jacket or a plaque, try telling me with a straight face that it looks passable on a uniform. Well, I suppose it doesn’t look all that bad, but it’s at best quite weak looking when on the uni.

Second, the primary logo could have been so much more, especially when you put it up against the old logo. Maybe they’re trying to pander to the roughly 25% of people living around Tampa Bay that are over 65 with something easy on the eyes. Maybe they really wanted to have a logo that would cause people to think they were going shopping instead of going to a Rays game – heck, that might even boost attendance. No matter the motivation, the new logo is a downgrade from their gaudy former logo – this is very noticeable when you compare the old word mark to the new.

Other minor details are the diamond – I’d rather have it without home plate and second base; with those features I think it looks cheap and makes something that should be subtle annoyingly obvious – and that odd gleam on the “R.” Plus, the logo is just plain – you can be simple without being plain. The plain logo leads to the even plainer uniforms, which can be a good thing, just not here.

Overall, this logo gets a grade of a weak (recurring theme here, which is quite fitting considering the franchise’s considerably weak history) C-, higher than it should be if only for the use of blue.

Team: Tampa Bay Rays
League: American League (MLB)
Location: St. Petersburg, FL
Stadium: Tropicana Field
Mascot: Raymond D. Ray
Merchandise: Get your Devil Rays merch before it’s too late!

Niagara IceDogs

Yikes, it's been a busy weekend. I had my best friend in town and we went to see his Washington State Cougars get blown the heck out of the water by USC. What an awful display they put on. We left at halftime and hightailed it to the Rose Bowl to see my Washington Huskies get blown the heck out of the water by UCLA. Kind of a brutal weekend of college football for us. Anyway, I haven't had much time, thankfully I have correspondents. Big thanks go out to John Baker for his review of another random logo. Expect more from him in the future...

When owners of a new minor-league franchise are at a loss for a new and clever name, there is a temptation to take any noun or adjective and simply stick the word “dogs” on the end of it. Sometimes, if the owners are feeling particularly clever or creative, they might change things around a bit and spell it “Doggs,” or, God help us, “Dawgs.” Thus, we have had inflicted on us Sea Dogs, Surf Dawgs, RiverDogs, Sun Dawgs, Beach Dogs, and Swamp Dogs, to name just a few.

Since one of my very own favorite teams ends its name with the word “Cats,” it is probably wise to point out that not all household pets are created equal. Some of these names are more clever than others. When the city of Memphis was angling for an NFL team some years ago, the proposed name was the Hound Dogs. That would have been a great name. Not only did it have an obvious connection to the iconic Elvis Presley song, but there really are hound dogs in Tennessee. When the owners of the Washington NBA franchise decided that Bullets was perhaps not the best name for a team located in a city with one of the highest rates of gun violence in the country, one of the proposed alternatives they came up with was Sea Dogs. This suggestion was met with laughter and derision, but at least the term already existed. If Washington, D.C. were located on the ocean, instead of some obscure river, and if the town was known for its maritime tradition, rather than for sex, lies and video tape, it might have worked. This would be a great name for a team located in Norfolk or Annapolis.

But some of these other alternatives are just silly. Surf Dogs and Beach Dogs bring to mind critters who make your local beach a hazardous place to walk. And if this is a women’s team we are talking about, would that make them the Beach Bitches? Come to think of it, that would be a pretty good name for, say, a roller derby team, but it would probably be a bit over the top for a team you might want to take your kids to watch.

This brings us to today’s entry, the Niagra IceDogs of the Ontario Hockey League, located in St Catharines Ontario. What exactly is an IceDog, anyway? Most dogs I am familiar with do not seem to care for ice any more than these other animals. Of course, there are those dogs in Alaska and Canada who run in those long races, but they are usually either referred to by their breed, most often Alaskan or Siberian Huskies, or are called sled dogs. Now, that wouldn’t be such a bad name for a team located in someplace like Fairbanks or Nome, but as far as I can tell, such hard working canines are not indigenous to southern Ontario. It seems an ice dog is just a dog with the word “ice” tacked on to the front of its name, and most dogs do not fair much better on ice than most people. They tend instead to get cold and fall down a lot, not the sort of image you would want for a hockey team. Some time this season, the IceDogs will take on their rivals the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds to determine the alpha male of the frozen canine set. Watch where you step, and don't eat that yellow snow!

So IceDogs is a dumb name. But perhaps the owners could get around that by coming up with a really compelling logo. How about a fierce or determined husky? How about some mean-looking critter biting through a hockey stick? How about a figure raising his hind leg above an opponents logo in a gesture of distain? Perhaps they could have, but alas, they didn’t. Instead, they came up with a cartoon-ish representation of a dog in a hockey uniform.

I am trying to figure out what I like about this logo, and the answer is, well, nothing really. There is nothing about it that tends to make it distinctive or connect it to the local community. It is just a dog in a hockey uniform. The drawing itself would not be bad if it were submitted as an assignment in a high school art class, but is otherwise nothing special. It is flat and two dimensional. It is not even clear whose uniform this bland pit bull-looking creature is wearing, as he has a big white X on his shoulder, which appears to be apropos of nothing in particular. The colors and word mark are not bad, but they are not especially compelling, either. The overall effect is just bland.

It doesn’t even make me want to bay at the moon in disgust, but instead to want to curl up on the floor and go to sleep. As logos go, I can hear this one barking.


Team: Niagara Ice Dogs
League: Ontario Hockey League
Location: St. Catharines, Ontario
Arena: Jack Gatecliff Arena

Topeka Roadrunners

Tonight marks a step forward for The Sports Logo Pundit as I unveil our very first Correspondent. Thanks to Chris Roberts of Turning 25 for stepping up and tackling a pretty rank logo (IMO) that I chose at random for him. Look for more reviews in the future from Chris and other correspondents. For the guys that have emailed me and I haven't yet responded, don't worry, I'll get back to you this week.


Logos for sports teams are funny in that you almost always have to suspend belief when you approach them.

What do I mean? Well, without question we accept a smug leprechaun to front the Boston Celtics, and for the past couple of years we have tolerated a buffalo-slug hybrid to represent a team called the “Sabres.” Realism isn’t a thing of necessity when it comes to sports logos. When executed rightly, you don’t need to be realistic, either – see also “Iron Pigs” and “Cardinals, Arizona.”

The suspension of belief should come naturally, though, as if the logo itself compels you to just [cue whisper] believe. I shouldn’t have to get myself into the zone to buy into a logo.

Inside that zone today is the logo for the Topeka RoadRunners. The team from Topeka is originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the RoadRunners moniker certainly passes better muster. This NAHL team is moving to Kansas’ capital this season after a grassroots movement among the city’s hockey fans to woo the team away from the land of enchantment.

Instead of a complete redesign, which a junior A hockey team probably couldn’t swing budget-wise, the RoadRunners are simply recoloring their logo and changing up the font in the word mark for the move. New this season are the golden-brown beak, changed from a much less natural blue, the silver color in the feathering, and a semi-serif-style font in place of the non-styled block-serif for the word mark.

Looking at the bulk of the logo, the roadrunner’s head, I’m first distracted by the whole “prehistoric” styling – the jagged black lines outlining the areas of color, the silver head-feathers sweeping up behind the beak to conjure imagery of mean, nasty horns or spikes (which you could easily mistake them for altogether at first glance).

Bothering me the most are the teeth – roadrunners don’t have teeth, so why make that such a prominent feature on your logo? Yes, it’s obviously a treatment to make the logo look meaner, but we’re back to the whole “forced suspension of belief” deal.

Plus, it’s an unnecessary liberty taken with the real bird’s morphology. Really unnecessary considering how successfully birds can be styled to look “mean” without adding teeth – see the Seahawks, the Ravens, and the aforementioned Arizona Cardinals.

Roadrunner head aside, the new font fits well and isn’t really all that bad. While I personally would stay away from a font like that, the style fits here pretty well.

While Topeka’s new, used hockey team comes with a refreshed logo that could be worse, it’s nowhere near the front of the pack, or flock if you want so badly that easy, easy pun. For that, I’m willing to give this guy a C+.


Team: Topeka RoadRunners
League: North American Hockey League
Location: Topeka, Kansas
Arena: Landon Arena
Mascot: Yes, it’s a roadrunner (surprise), but I can’t find his/her name anywhere!
Merchandise: Not online yet