Worcester Red Sox

120

I was all set to have some fun with this logo. I was going to make a bunch of jokes about how the designers had inadvertently made a logo that looked like a 3-D version of the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face, how I wasn't sure what they had been trying to do but clearly they didn't succeed because it looked like the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face, blah blah blah. I couldn't believe that the designers and team had gone all the way through the design process for this logo and not once had it occurred to anybody that it looked like the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face, and I was going to have a field day pointing that out.

In fact that was exactly what they were aiming for.

As it turns out, the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face was developed in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1963. You will note that I did not say it was originally developed there and then. This is because there are known to be predecessors — it's not like nobody ever thought to draw two dots and a curved line as a smiley face until the 1960s, after all. But it was when Harvey Ball came up with his specific version that things really took off in a worldwide-phenomenon sort of way. Maybe I should be calling it the 60s "Have a Nice Day" face, but my understanding is that it wasn't until around 1970 or 1971 that it really peaked. I certainly don't remember seeing it in the 60s. Of course, that may be because I hadn't been born yet.

It should be noted that the reason Ball came up with it is that he had been hired by an insurance form to raise morale among workers after a corporate merger. Jaded creature that I am, this surprises me for a few reasons. First, I'm shocked that corporate overlords gave enough of a shit to do something to raise morale. But what surprises me more is that it apparently worked. Employees actually liked the little smiley face, and it seems to have actually raised morale. I've been through a few corporate mergers, and all I can say is that while they didn't all lead to poor morale, when it did it was the sort of thing that was going to take a hell of a lot more than a lousy cartoon drawing to fix. Among my coworkers that smiley face and the idea that it could possibly raise morale would have instantly turned into a running joke. Maybe it's a generational thing? We Gen X'ers are famous for being jaded, after all. In any case, there's absolutely no way this would have raised morale among me and my coworkers, but it did for the people at that insurance firm. Good for them, I guess.

Of course, having the logo be just the 70s "Have a nice day" face wouldn't be enough. The team is called the Worcester Red Sox, so the logo has to include red socks. They've therefore turned the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face into a full body, with arms and legs, so that the arms can swing a baseball bat and the legs can wear red socks. But for some reason, the red socks cover the entire leg. In fact, it looks like they actually come up a little bit onto the torso. That's disturbing. It doesn't help that aside from those socks and a baseball cap, the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face is naked. The legs are at least positioned such that they obscure any genitalia that the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face might have, which is a good thing because according to the logo designers part of the reason they went with the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face in the logo was they wanted something family-friendly. Genitalia, of course, are not family-friendly. But then again, neither is a living creature wearing nothing but a baseball cap and leg-length socks.

Above the head is written "WooSox". "Woo" comes from the fact that Worcester is informally known as "The Woo". Why? Probably because people who actually live in Worcester don't know how to pronounce "Worcester" any more than the rest of us do. The W has a heart in it, which is the one thing in the whole logo I actually like, because it's a reference to the city seal, which features a heart surrounded by a wreath. I don't know why the seal features that and it's probably something goofy, but that's not the team's doing and I'm judging the team's logo, not the city's seal. The heart shape also makes for a suitably old-timey looking W, which makes it a good counterpart to the Boston Red Sox' old-timey B. So that's one thing they did right.

Well, that and blocking our view of the 70s "Have a Nice Day" face's genitalia, I guess.

Final Score: 120 points.
Penalties: Sox, 20 pts; Script, 7 pts; Offspring, 12 pts; Humanoid (because the face has arms), 30 pts; Player, 51 pts.
Bonuses: None.