No. 3: Philadelphia Phillies

World Fuckin' Champions!

Before last season, I was only aware of the Phillies in any sort of direct sense for three reasons:

1. I grew up wishing I’d been cognizant and aware of baseball when the Orioles last won the World Series in 1983, against the Phillies.

2. For some reason, I ended up with a disproportionate number of Dale Murphy Donruss cards in 1986/1987.

3. The NLCS winning team from 1993, specifically Lenny “Nails” Dykstra, and Randy Johnson scaring the shit out of John Kruk at the ‘93 All-Star game.

What I have noticed since they’ve been contending once more is how much I loathe the new “P” on their caps and jerseys compared to this chunky-yet-sleek, monstrously cool 70s logo. Plus, the shift from the more unique maroon to the now ubiquitous (in baseball, at least) fire engine red definitely leaves a lot to be desired.

I love the smooth curves on display here, and that it is clearly a single object. It’s clean and cohesive and has a real completeness about it. Bring it back!

No. 4: Toronto Blue Jays

Baseball, eh?

It wasn’t until about a year and a half ago when I was watching the Orioles play the Blue Jays that I realized how much I missed the old Toronto unis. The tone-on-tone blue palette works so well, and contrasts nicely with the red symbolizing the Canadian flag. It’s a real shame that the ball club felt they needed to mess with the old design, but I guess I can kind of understand the reasoning behind it; it was largely unchanged for the first 25 years of the team’s existence, and it did have a somewhat dated retro 70s/80s feel. Plus, the single best way a sports franchise can drum up merchandising dollars is to change uniforms.

That being said, it’s somewhat disheartening that they went in the direction they did; there’s something very late 20th/early 21st century about the current logo and uniform in terms of the color palette and very streamlined design, but it’s not particularly timeless. It already looks pretty dated, and a little too much like a minor league uniform for comfort. There’s a good reason that the Red Sox, Yankees and Dodgers have left well enough alone over the last 70-80 years: baseball is a business, and every bit of marketing material, from letterhead to the logos on the team’s caps should reinforce and strengthen the brand. The easiest way to achieve that sort of brand positioning is to simplify. It’s no surprise that Tampa Bay is finally selling merchandise—winning helps, but so does not having a gradient-heavy manta ray on your uniform.

Infinite Playlist #7

School of Seven Bells, ‘Half Asleep’

No. 5: Montreal Expos

Les Expos de Montréal!

Poor Montreal; they never really stood a chance of keeping baseball. Forget it Jake, it’s hockeytown.

Again with the bold, bright red/royal color combo, but what I really like are the soft, round, fluid curves coupled with the visual symbolism—the colors delineate the letter forms that spell out the full name of the team in French: Les Expos de Montreal Baseball Club. Plus the team name itself is just so fresh and original—completely detached from the well of typical team names like the Giants, Cardinals, et al.

Bold. Simple. Elegant.

Infinite Playlist #6

‘Heaven & Hell’, The El Michels Affair

No. 6: Chicago Cubs

Go Cubs Go!

Poor, poor Cubbies. The last 10 or so seasons have been brutal to follow, because every year you’ve seemed so tantalizingly close to ending the curse. You’ve acquired all the missing pieces, all the necessary tools.

Then the actual season starts. Injuries occur. Your bats slump while your pitching’s hot and vice versa. Then August hits and both go down at the same time.

What I love about this is how beautifully simple it is. Compact, concentric, balanced, and great colors. That royal blue is just so inviting, unlike the neutral, modern navy used in the Washington Nationals’ uniforms. The red is bright and playful, not the harsh crimson of the Nats  or D’Backs. This just looks like “fun”, the same way a ball and stick always have, from wiffles to fungoes to Louisville Sluggers.

And then there’s this:

Pushing back against the push-back, or why we need the public option.

I try not to get soapbox-y here in the blogosphere, because it opens my little collection of musings to vitriolic chest-thumping.

So to avoid a potential headache, here’s what you need to know about me:

I am a liberal. A very progressive liberal. I think single-payer health care is the way to go. I think same-sex couples have an inalienable right to get married and divorced with the same enthusiasm and frequency as hetero folk. I think that on the whole, organized religion is a perversion of the tenets from which it initially sprung. I don’t think the second amendment should cover semi-automatic or automatic weapons. I think that the first amendment has limitations as far as what it protects when it is invoked to justify fomenting violence except in the most exceptional cases, and crying about a 3-5% tax hike when you make $250,000 a year is not one of those exceptions.

I find it appalling that certain segments of our society view out-of-control, inefficient defense spending as sound fiscal policy but balk at investing in the reform of our health care system.

The public option is not being “forced” on anybody. And fiscal conservatives that whine about a relatively small tax increase for the wealthiest among us should really take a long, hard look in the mirror. Your behavior is not at all Christ-like, and besides, I didn’t really like the fact that my tax dollars over the last 6 years (and counting) were funding an unnecessary war and the torturing of innocent people, but you didn’t see me Photoshopping swastikas all over Bush’s face.

Get a fucking job. Maybe then the majority of you that oppose the public option might actually make half of what it would take to bump you into the tax bracket being aimed at to fund this thing.

And Democratic policy-makers? Sac up. Act like you won for a change.

No. 7: San Francisco Giants

Of all the MLB teams, the ones comprising the NL West have probably garnered the least attention from me over the years. Not only are they not in the AL East with the Orioles, but they’re not in the AL or the eastern part of the country. They are the polar opposites of what I’m paying attention to as a baseball fan.

Another thing to factor into this is the fact that, apart from a blip here or there, the NL West hasn’t been well-represented in the post season in my lifetime. Before interleague play was introduced in 1997, the postseason was really the only exposure I had to NL teams in general, and the fact that most of them didn’t go very deep in the playoffs or field successful clubs in successive seasons really limited that already minuscule amount of exposure. In fact, NL West teams have only accounted for six World Series champion ballclubs since the World Series as we know it today began in 1903. And that includes original division-founding franchises the Cincinnati Reds, Atlanta Braves, and Houston Astros that have since been re-aligned to the NL Central and NL East. Compare that to the 42 Series wins for AL East teams (including four from the Detroit Tigers before they were re-aligned to the AL Central.) No comparison at all, really.

While there’s no doubt that interleague play has certainly made me more aware and interested in the goings-on in the National League, it still feels a little alien to me.

But I digress; this post is all about the NL West, or, at the very least, the San Francisco Giants. The G’ints get the nod over the Los Angeles Dodgers, but just barely. Both clubs have extremely timeless and iconic logos and color schemes. A big part of that stems from the fact that, compared to their division rivals, they are the elder statesmen, at least as of the most recent division re-alignment. Just more proof that everything was cooler before I was born.

Where’s my merlot?!

Strangely, this blog has as-of-yet not featured (m)any posts about my cats. They play a pretty integral part in my day-to-day life, and at the risk of coming off like a crazy cat person, I love them like children.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say regarding the peaks and valleys of pet ownership, but I thought I’d introduce you to one of my boys, Bigby. This was taken over the weekend during a dinner party my wife and I hosted.

Put it in my stomach, bitchez!

We took Bigby in on a particularly cold and wet night in mid-April of this year. We’d been aware of Bigby pretty much since we moved onto our street; he and his brother lived in a house up the block and were almost always in the front window of their house. That is, until their owners moved and threw them out on the street. We saw them intermittently after that; we would have taken them in in a heartbeat, but had just acquired a second cat, and we just didn’t have room in our tiny rowhouse for four cats. Fast forward two years later, and we’re back down to one cat after the tragic passing of our girl Sadie. We catch sight of this big guy, and he’s frozen and wet, and pretty much willing to follow us all the way down the street to our place. A month later, and we caught sight of Hobbes (Bigby’s bro), and he followed suit. The two of them have been wonderful companions for our elder statesman Oliver ever since.

No. 8: New York Mets

Meet the Mets, greet the Mets, come on out and beat the Mets!

Kind of an anomaly as far as my aesthetics go, the Mets logo is positively crammed with visual information, which I typically find disorienting and unappealing in most logos. But every element has a purpose, and the garish orange and blue combo, which I often hate, is built into that symbolism.

From Wikipedia:

In the primary logo, designed by sports cartoonist Ray Gatto, each part of the skyline has special meaning — at the left is a church spire, symbolic of Brooklyn, the borough of churches; the second building from the left is the Williamsburg Savings Bank, the tallest building in Brooklyn; next is the Woolworth Building; after a general skyline view of midtown comes the Empire State Building; at the far right is the United Nations Building. The bridge in the center symbolizes that the Mets, by bringing National League baseball back to New York, represent all five boroughs.

That’s so cool! Obviously, it helps that NYC has such a distinctive skyline; Atlanta or Chicago or Los Angeles could never pull this sort of thing off. But the intrinsic payoff for all the symbolism on display here is that you know the Mets will never leave, no matter how legendarily futile their World Series campaigns usually are, because the team’s entire existence is so tied up in its replacement of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers.

It’s all very sweet, really. A love letter to an entire city. Mets fans should be honored (I know I’d be.)