Lake Erie Crushers

188

The Lake Erie Crushers (based in Avon, Ohio) get their name and logo from the Ohio wine industry and—

Wait a second. Show of hands here: Who has ever heard of the Ohio wine industry? Hmm...I don't see any hands raised right now. Of course I don't; I'm staring at a computer screen and can't actually see if you did raise your hand. But I suspect that even if I could I wouldn't see many hands raised, because it's unlikely that anyone outside of Ohio is really that familiar with the Ohio wine industry. Probably not too many people inside it, either.

When I first read the bit about a team in Ohio being named after wine I literally laughed out loud. I figured it couldn't have much of a wine industry. So I did some checking and...well, I'm not really sure. You could argue it either way if you wanted to. On one hand, Ohio's 208 wineries are approximately 2% of the wineries in the entire country, and when you consider that there are fifty states, you'd expect a state to have roughly two percent of the wineries. And in terms of production, they're seriously small-fry, producing roughly one quarter of one percent of all the wine produced in the U.S. But guess what? That actually gets them in the top ten in terms of number of wineries (8th, to be precise), and they barely miss the top ten (11th) in production. We all know that California dominates American wine production, but did you know it dominates it to the point of having 45% of the wineries and 86% of the production? The only other states that have more than 5% of the wineries are Oregon and Washington (8% each); the only other states that produce more than 1% of the wine are Washington (5%) and New York (4%).

(Don't ask what state has the fewest. I was curious and started to do a little checking, but I quickly realized that finding out would require spending at least a minute or two looking into every single state's wine industry, and I'm not that curious. Suffice it to say that none of them have as many as California. Except California, of course.)

The fact that Ohio actually ranks fairly high in wine production nonwithstanding, I'm still snickering at the idea. To be fair, I live in the state that produces more wine than Ohio, and I'd laugh if anyone tried to name a baseball team here after wine. And the logo certainly isn't helping matters any. We've got an anthropomorphized grape holding a bat with a bunch of grapes hanging off it. Assuming the bat is regulation length, the grapes on the bunch are approximately normal size, and the anthropomorphized grape is somewhere around half a meter (20") tall.

I don't know how to reconcile a half-meter-tall anthropomorphized grape with normal-sized grapes, but every idea I can come up with is fairly disturbing:

1. The smaller grapes are the larger grape's children. Question number one, is the larger grape the smaller grapes' mother or father? Question number two, is the larger grape aware of the fact that several of his/her children have fallen off the bunch and are presumably falling to their deaths? This grape clearly isn't going to be winning any "parent of the year" awards any time soon. Question three, how do anthropomorphic grapes mate, given the fact that they're basically big heads with arms coming out of where the ears should be?

2. The larger grape is no relation to the smaller grapes and is keeping them around as a snack. Sure, grapes are a healthy snack. But I believe this is what's commonly referred to as "cannibalism".

3. The smaller grapes are a sort of good luck charm. That's no better. Who ever heard of grapes being a good luck charm? And since it's a grape doing this, who ever heard of babies being a good luck charm? I certainly wouldn't hang babies off a baseball bat as a good luck charm. That would be sick, and after a couple of days they'd start to smell bad. Maybe they're not real grapes, and that's not nearly so sick, but it's still pretty damn weird. Would I hang babydolls off a bat as a good luck charm? I'm thinking no.

4. I'm really overthinking things and need to just knock it off. Um, yeah. We'll go with that.

Final Score: 85 points.
Penalties: Region (egregious), 17 pts; Humanoid (egregious), 61 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Player, 51 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None.