Northwest Arkansas Naturals

61

NOTE: This review incorporates text from the review for the Naturals' previous logo, which was posted on 2017 April 30.

Some team names are terrible in a recent kind of way. No one would think up a name like Wilkes-Barre/Scranton RailRiders in 1924, and even if they had they wouldn't have made RailRiders a single word with a capital R in the middle of it. Other names clearly come from this recent trend of bizarre compound words, such as Hagerstown Flying Boxcars, Binghamton Rumble Ponies, and Amarillo Sod Poodles.

Others speak to a naming convention that dominated long, long ago. Asheville Tourists? That clearly sounds like a name that was first used over a century ago, and sure enough it was first used in 1915. Arkansas Travelers? Yep, 1895. Birmingham Barons? Unlike the other examples I've given that's actually a good name but there's still something about it that sounds very old-fashioned, and indeed it dates all the way back to 1885. And then we come to the Northwest Arkansas Naturals and you just know that no one in the Twenty-First Century would come up with a name like this. It's got to date back to before the Great Depression.

Nope. This one doesn't even manage to pre-date the Great Recession, as the name debuted in 2008. The name apparently comes from two sources: the fact that one of Arkansas's nicknames is "The Natural State" and the fact that the owner of this team also owns the Buffalo Bisons (another old name; in fact, it's the oldest name in minor league baseball, dating all the way back to 1877), whose old stadium was used to film numerous scenes in the movie The Natural. The Naturals came into existence when Bob Rich Jr., owner of not just the Buffalo Bisons but also the Wichita Wranglers, became interested in moving the Wranglers (apparently attendance in Wichita had been terrible for years) and expressed interest in moving to Springdale, Arkansas if the city would approve financing for a new stadium. Meanwhile, in Springdale itself, people were campaigning to get the local referendum approved and thought they had it clinched when the pastor of a local megachurch came out in support of the stadium.

Then Mister Megapastor discovered that the stadium was going to sell *gasp* beer at the games, and pulled his support. It almost resulted in the referendum being defeated.

Look, I've got nothing against people who don't want to drink. It's a personal decision and everyone should get to make that decision for themselves. But part of letting people make that decision is letting people who want to have a damn beer at the ball game have a damn beer at the ball game. I'm not keen on saying the stadium shouldn't be selling beer and I'm certainly not keen on moralizing megapastors trying to deny the whole community the opportunity to land a baseball team because my-oh-my-there's-gonna-be-alcohol-someone-get-me-a-fainting-couch. And seriously: was it not obvious from the get-go that the stadium was going to sell beer? Doesn't pretty much every baseball stadium where it's legal to do so sell beer? If this pastor was so against the sale of alcohol, why did it not occur to him to at least inquire about that before coming out in favor of the stadium?

In any case, in the end the referendum passed by a mere fifteen votes. I'm just guessing here, but I have to think Mister Megapastor, once he decided to start campaigning against the stadium, must have come up with arguments other than "Eeeeeeeeek, beer!" Could campaigning against it just on the grounds of it selling alcohol really have reduced the margin of victory to fifteen votes? Maybe my home town of Raleigh is more of a godless Gomorrah than I realize, but I suspect that if a megapastor in Raleigh had tried to campaign against building a sports stadium because it was going to serve booze, he'd be lucky to change the margin of victory by fifteen votes, much less to fifteen votes. And if it was a basketball stadium, he'd be lucky to change a single vote. This is North Carolina we're talking about, after all. The main denominations around here aren't Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic, they're Wolfpack, Tar Heel, and Blue Devil.

It any case, the referendum did pass, so the town got the team. And as noted above, the team is named the Naturals as a double homage to the state nickname and the baseball movie. The logo is, well, nature. At least it is aside from the highly unnatural replacement of the sun with a baseball. I suppose they had to do something other than a yellow sun given that they'd already made the sky yellow, but it's a really cheesy thing to put into an otherwise solid logo. Seriously, I'm bringing the baseball up largely there's not much else to criticize in the logo. I'd personally have made the word "Naturals" smaller relative to the state outline, but maybe the designer tried that and it didn't work. It's a fairly minor problem in any case.

Sort of like a baseball stadium serving alcohol when you don't want to drink. Seriously, Mister Megapastor, just order a cola and ignore everyone else. Quit sticking your nose in other people's business.

Scoring note: The logo does not get the "Scenery" penalty since the scenery relates directly to the nickname.

Final Score: 61 points.
Penalties: Region, 8 pts; Reference (to the movie), 10 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Equipment, 13 pts; Colorful, 31 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -6 pts.