Hall Marks
The thriving market for old team emblems is driven by nostalgia for a mythical
sports past.
By Phil Patton
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Main Street,
Cooperstown, New York: It's the father-son bonding capital of America.
Home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, this shady,
Andy Hardy-style thoroughfare is also lined with stores selling
bats, balls, gloves, cards, and clothing. Caps are displayed in
vast rows, tracing the history of the game from its earliest days
to the present. Some of these caps were worn for just a few seasons;
others represent obscure minor-league teams. But just as Cooperstown
calls to mind the myth that baseball was invented here, the old
team emblems evoke something equally mythical: an idealized sports
past.
The simpler
logos and emblems of the past show up on city streets, in malls
all over the country, on the heads of TV stars conspicuously seated
in camera range. And just as "old-fashioned" ball parks like Camden
Yards in Baltimore became popular in reaction to the proliferation
of high-tech domes, the popularity of the uncomplicated logos is
a response to glitzy expansion-team graphics.
The demand
for sports logos has increased, and the reason is the baseball cap.
In the last decade, the cap has firmly established itself as the
T-shirt of the head--over one billion dollars worth of them are sold
annually.
When I was 10, I had one: a woolen Yankees hat that
made me feel like Mickey Mantle, purchased by mail order. My 10-year-old
son has roughly two dozen caps, and studies suggest that the average
teenage boy owns at least half a dozen.
Erik Stuebe,
who founded Blue Marlin Corp. in 1994 to sell caps with Negro League
logos, calls today's expansion-team emblems "hideous." He says:
"We gravitated to vintage logos because of the aesthetic: simple,
elemental, monochrome graphics. It seems to me that the logos of
expansion teams--the Raptors or the Mighty Ducks, with their 12 colors
and cartoon-like characters--are aimed at kids. Often, they seem
technologically driven as well."
Part of the
appeal
of the old emblems lies in the values they project,
the eras they imply--much less mercenary times, imbued with tradition,
resistant to change, before fickle franchise moves and random roster
shifts, before free agency and the designated hitter. But on closer
examination the simpler times these simple graphics seem to suggest
turn out to be a rosy cartoon, as mythical as Cooperstown's own
past.
While there's
a lot of history attached to these early caps, the logos and emblems
of expansion teams are a different story. "Is there a single color
they didn't manage to get into the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' logo?"
asks Jerry Cohen, founder and owner of Ebbets Field Flannels, the
first major manufacturer of retro sports gear. When Devil Rays or
Dia-mondbacks are starting out, they confer with design pros before
talking to baseball pros. Marketing consultants advise them that
teal will pull in women as well as men, that black is hot in urban
markets, that metallics are the coming thing. Often a new franchise's
choice of logo is more important than its first pick in the expansion
draft. That logo must not only look good on the uniform or the program,
but on any number of other licensed goods. The potential applications
are endless. A friend of mine, a Dallas Cowboys fan, keeps on his
coffee table a bowl of M&M candies bearing the team's silver star.
A good logo must also play well with others. Often team logos crossbreed
as they co-brand with commercial brands--cartoon character Taz dances
across a Yankee cap, Nike's swoosh sails over a Giants logo on a
T-shirt.
Logos can also
be historical hybrids. In 1962, the New York Mets cleverly tapped
local tradition by combining motifs from New York's recently departed
National League teams: the Giants' orange intersecting N and Y with
Dodgers blue.
Jerry Cohen
 grew
up in New York, rooting for the home teams and gorging himself on
local baseball lore, but he became fascinated by the edges of the
sport--the minor leagues, the Negro Leagues. "I was drawn to things
with stories," says Cohen, who began selling reproduction caps and
garb in 1987. As if colorizing an old film, he began research into
the black-and-white-photo world of the Negro Leagues, trying to
determine what colors and fabrics they had used.
For marginal
leagues Cohen found that few uniforms survived, except among collectors.
He also learned that players rarely kept uniforms or remembered
their colors. "They can tell you about how a pitcher's curve ball
broke on a certain day, but have no idea whether his cap was red
or blue." Cohen's Ebbets Field Flannel customers tend to fall into
two categories. One group demands maximum authenticity (or as close
to an exact replica of the cap that Satchel Paige wore as possible).
The other is motivated by fashion and satisfied with simply the flavor
of the past, wanting a comfortable product inspired by the original.
Blue Marlin,
on the other hand, goes for the style-conscious.
The list of celebrities spotted wearing its caps--Leonardo DiCaprio,
Beck, Cindy Crawford, Steve Buscemi, Bruce Springsteen--helped secure
its place in the fashion firmament and push sales to around $5 million
a year. The company was among the first to bring back the soft,
prewar-style cap. To its first offerings from the Negro Leagues,
it has since added the logos of various minor-league teams, Latin
American teams, Hawaiian plantation teams, and even prison teams.
Blue Marlin's
caps don't claim to be full-fledged reproductions. They have adjustable
backs and the name of the team, along with the year, embroidered
on the back. They're made of cotton. Original caps were made of
wool, as are those worn by today's Major League players. Companies
pay for rights to most of the images. The Kansas City Monarch's
emblem, for instance, is now owned by the Negro Leagues Base-ball
Museum, in Kansas City, Missouri. Royalties run between three and
10 percent.
More retro logos
will soon appear. The NFL is working with Cohen on a line from the
pre-Super Bowl American Football League. The Giants are bringing
back their 1960s helmet logo. Fubu is reviving emblems from the
American Basketball Association of the 1960s and 70s--the graphic
equivalent of disco, some would say.
Traditional
team
 uniforms
had their origins in basic letters and fabrics. The White Sox and
Red Sox were among the first teams to make the simple distinction
of wearing hosiery of a fixed color. And many of the initials and
lettering styles--from the Cubs to the Celtics--that today seem both
individual and traditional were simply pulled out of catalogs or
off shelves 70 years ago (although the Celtics attribute their leprechaun
to the brother of legendary coach Red Auerbach). The old baseball
caps came in different sizes, of course, but their production values
were inexact. Their designs were not focus-grouped into existence
either; often they were hastily drawn up and sewn on by the equipment
manager or a local seamstress pressed into service.
In uniforms,
as in team image, longevity builds tradition, overcoming commerce
and even
 absurdities.
The Yankees Web page suggests its "NY" had beginnings as a plate
designed by Tiffany, but old photos show many similar letter treatments
that are likelier inspirations. While those of us who recall that
New Orleans once had an NBA franchise will never quite get used
to the Utah Jazz, the Lakers have built up so much tradition in
L.A. that we've forgotten all about the Minneapolis Lakers. And
success on the field seems to swell team heraldry into glory: the
Green Bay "G" looked wonderful in pictures behind Vince Lombardi,
but in the wilderness years between Bart Starr and Brett Favre,
you could almost feel that proud letter deflating.
Some team logos
evoke lost worlds--the persistence of the Brooklyn Dodgers legend
is the prime example, hailing a borough Before the Fall, the Garden
of Ebbets Field before it was razed for a housing project, before
greed sent both the Dodgers and the Giants west. But tradition can
grow up as quickly as a boy outgrows a fitted cap.
 Time
not only mythologizes, it covers up the squalid details of sports
business. The more you study the origins of logos and emblems, the
more sense you get of the business vagaries of the early days of
professional sports. The NFL was born in a meeting held in a used-car
dealership; it often missed payrolls. The NBA had teams in cities
like Rochester, Sheboygan, and Fort Wayne. Until the late-1960s,
the NHL had only six teams. Baseball was characterized even in the
Twenties and Thirties by the same cavalier movement of franchises
that we've become used to today in football, basketball, and hockey.
Even the Yankees began in 1903 as the "Highlanders," a lowly American
League franchise from Baltimore that formally took the Yankee name
only when they moved to the Polo Grounds 10 years later. They still
stood in the shadow of the Dodgers and Giants of the more established
National League.
Today, of course,
the Yankee logo is the most venerable in sports, and marketers can't
keep their hands off it. Not content with special-edition World
Series shirts and caps, they've taken to playing with the colors.
The Yankee emblem now shows up in malls in all kinds of variants.
Walk past Lids, a chain store that depends for its existence on
new models of baseball-style hats, and you see lime-green Yankee
caps, red Yankee caps, even white-on-white Yankee caps. It's like
walking into some vast color-blindness test. One step further are
the Chinese logo caps, saying (I think) "NY" or "Brooklyn." Intentional
obscurity replaces clarity of allegiance: the idea of such a cap
is to elicit a question.
In this environment,
seeing the New York Black Yankees logo for the first time commonly
produces a double take. "It's an ein the know' thing," said the
publicist for Blue Marlin. But once you get the full story, seeing,
say, Calista Flockhart in a New York Cuban Giants cap is like hearing
a high-school band do covers of old R&B hits--slightly silly.
Professional
football began as a fly-by-night operation, says Jerry Cohen; it
was no more respectable than wrestling, looked down on by the amateur
purists of the college game. Uniforms and helmets were pretty much
off-the-shelf until 1946, when Fred Gehrke, running back for the
Los Angeles Rams and alumnus of the University of Utah art program,
painted gold horns on the team's helmets. Those horns, much evolved,
looked as good in last year's Super Bowl as they did when they were
fresh off of Gehrke's brush, even if the franchise had moved on
to St. Louis. (The bird on the helmets of the old St. Louis franchise,
the Cardinals, now peers out absurdly in Arizona.)
What was wonderful
about the horns was the way they adapted to the shape of the helmet,
its swollen ear guards. Still, other teams were slow to follow.
It took several years before the Philadelphia Eagles added silver
wings to their helmets. The Colts' horseshoe and the Packers' "G"
didn't come on the scene until the late-1950s. It took the televised
championship game between the Colts and Giants in 1958 to make the
NFL graphics-conscious as well as big business.
The old core
of NHL franchises put a lot of stock in their original logos, as
solid and foursquare as a good check into the boards: Chicago's
Indian chief and Detroit's automobile wheel, which remains, commendably,
an old tire-and-spoke affair from a Thirties roadster. The Philadelphia
Flyers graphic remains as strong and old-fashioned as the enforcers
that the team always seems to put on the ice. Toronto, however,
began with a noble 47-point maple leaf. But as the team's Web page
explains, over the years the team reduced the number of points on
the leaf exponentially, as if laboring under the burden of some
obscure Canadian tax on acute angles, turning it from a wonderful
botanical fantasy into a banal white silhouette.
Most of hockey's
newer franchises, of course, match the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of baseball
and the Toronto Raptors of basketball for logotype excess. Sport
was always commerce, but what has changed is that logo licensing
has become not just big business but one of the vital revenue sources
for all the major sports. Baseball expansion teams can now sell
merchandise up to two years in advance of their first game, as if
royalties were needed to assemble a starter kitty for player salaries.
(For a year before the team started playing, the Florida Marlins
cap was the hat to have on city streets; after play started, it
was never as cool again.)
In such a world,
old logos--like old players--deserve respect, wherever they show up.
It's easy to sneer at the reappearance of the old emblems on yuppie
garb as the campy selling of tradition--thin wine in new bottles.
But another view is to admire the persistence of the images themselves.
In a media world where the old is plowed under every season, these
strong, determined, selfish memes have survived even transplantation
and hybrid-ization. "If you build it, they will come," the movie
myth has it. But the cornfields that turned into magic diamonds
to lure ghost players are now run by the sports version of agribusiness
with a different motto: if you mark it, they will buy. |
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