Ontario Tower Buzzers

51

Nothing about this team quite makes sense.

First, where did it come from? This is confusing due to the fact that there's a company out there that owns over half the teams in the California League (and roughly forty percent of all the teams in affiliated minor league baseball, which would be an interesting discussion in and of itself but that will have to wait for another day). In the 2025 season, this company owned the Modesto Nuts who were affiliated with the Seattle Mariners, the Inland Empire 66ers of San Bernardino who were affiliated with the Los Angeles Angels, and the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes who were affiliated with the Los Angeles Dodgers; Ontario didn't have a team. This season the Nuts are no more, the 66ers are now affiliated with the Mariners, the Quakes are affiliated with the Angels, and the Ontario Tower Buzzers are affiliated with the Dodgers. This raises two obvious questions in my mind:

1. Did the Nuts franchise move to San Bernardino, the (old) 66ers franchise to Rancho Cucamonga, and the (old) Quakes franchise to Ontario? Or did the Nuts franchise move directly to Ontario and then the affiliations got shuffled around?

2. Wouldn't it have been a hell of a lot simpler to just let the new Ontario team be the Mariners affiliate?

The second thing that makes no sense is the name. Supposedly it comes from Ontario's aviation heritage. Or maybe it's from the movie Top Gun. The team gives both as an explanation even though they don't really mesh all that well. The Top Gun reference isn't especially local (the movie is set in the San Diego area while Ontario is on the outskirts of the Greater Los Angeles area). And Ontario doesn't really have an aviation heritage, it just has an airport. It may be an old airport — it dates to the 1920s — but there are two other, larger airports in Greater Los Angeles that date to the 1920s as well, and over a dozen other airports overall. The presence of an airport really does nothing to differentiate Ontario from any of the other cities in Greater Los Angeles that have baseball teams. It's a bit like bragging that your city has a park.

And then there's the logo. The team is named after airplanes in one way or another, so do we have an airplane in the logo? Of course not! We have a bee! And yes, I know that bees buzz, but come on. A plane is the obvious thing to have "buzzing" the tower, and instead they go with an insect. I get that they did it in part to justify having a bee as their mascot, but they could have put a plane in the logo and still had the mascot be a bee. (The mascot's name, incidentally, is not Buzz or Buzzy or anything like that. They went with another Top Gun reference and called the mascot Maverick.)

So the origin of the team doesn't quite make sense, the origin of the nickname doesn't quite make sense, and the logo doesn't quite make sense. But I guess this is what happens when a single company owns nearly fifty minor league baseball teams — they can't keep up with everything and nothing winds up quite right.

Final Score: 51 points.
Penalties: Compound, 34 pts; Script, 7 pts; Name, 10 pts.
Bonuses: None.