Lake County Captains

118

The Lake County Captains play, in the city of Eastlake, Ohio. Not knowing much about Eastlake, I decided to check out the Wikipedia webpage for it so that I could learn a bit about its history. Allow me to now copy and paste the entire "history" section of that city's Wikipedia page:

The single largest blackout in North American history on August 14, 2003, was traced back to a FirstEnergy generating plant in Eastlake that went offline at 1:31 P.M. EDT amid high electrical demand. It caused 50 million people to lose power in eight U.S. states and southeastern Canada.

Seriously, that's the whole thing. Apparently nothing has ever happened in the city of Eastlake except for causing a power outage that stretched from Massachusetts to Michigan. The city website isn't much better: the History page there includes such monumental events as "In 1880’s the wealthy people came from Cleveland to build summer homes" and "In 1987 new shopping malls & business came to Eastlake." The city's history page says nothing about the blackout. In fact, it say nothing about anything that happened after 1994. Not that it's saying much about what happened before 1994, either. And you may think that I deliberately cherry-picked the most trivial things I could find on that history page, but I promise you I didn't. Check out the page yourself if you don't believe me.

To be fair, having this little in the way of history is not necessarily a bad thing. Nearby Cleveland (Eastlake is a suburb of Cleveland) has a far more interesting history, but it includes things like riots over a bridge, organized crime, and of course the fact that the Cuyahoga River once caught on fire. The river in Eastlake (which is for some strange reason called the Chagrin River) has never caught fire. It's a nice enough river that the State of Ohio has designated it a state scenic river, although I suspect that only thing a river in Ohio has to do to earn that designation is not catch fire.

As you could probably guess from the name and the fact that it's a suburb of Cleveland, Eastlake is on the shore of Lake Erie. So a nautical name is hardly surprising. The name Captains is just so-so, but as with history, having a noteworthy name can be a mixed blessing. Lake County Captains will never show up on a list of the best team names in minor league sports history, but it won't show up on a list of the worst ones, either.

The team's original logo was a pilot wheel with the name in front of it, which was as noteworthy as everything else associated with Eastlake. Now the team has decided they need something more noteworthy, so they replaced the old logo with one that also isn't noteworthy. A cartoony-looking captain is holding a baseball bat and sticking his body through a life saver with the team's name on it. Ho hum.

Again, this isn't really a complaint. But after a while, maybe things get so non-eventful that you wish you had something to complain about just to remind you that you are in fact alive and not dead and in limbo. You reach a point where you want something, anything to happen. Even a blackout that affects fifty million people.

Final Score: 118 points.
Penalties: Region, 8 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Equipment, 13 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Player, 51 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -6 pts.