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The other day, one of my friends (and former editor) Blake Hurtik (better known as the creator, director, CEO, and commander-in-chief of The Hurtik Locker) showed me a Sporcle quiz he had created called “Can you name the MLB 2010 Team Slogans?”
Before you do anything, take the quiz now, and see how many you can answer: http://www.sporcle.com/games/bhurtik/MLBteamslogans
I was pretty proud of my 16/24, but considering that these are slogans representing MLB franchises, shouldn’t any reasonably invested baseball fan be able to identify most of these? That’s when I realized the unintentional comedy behind many of these slogans, and how ridiculous they actually seem upon further review.
So here, I’d now like to propose how these ridiculous slogans would translate in other situations and what I’d make the team’s slogan if I was the club’s PR manager. In no particular order, here are some of my 2010 MLB favorites:
Blue Jays pitcher Adam Lind makes a routine catch in front of another packed crowd at Rogers Centre.
1. The Toronto Blue Jays “You Belong at the Game” Currently dead last in the MLB in overall attendance at home/away games, this slogan feels more like a request, or even desperate plea.
Parallel Slogan: The Suffolk Jr. High School Girls Wrestling Meet “You Belong at the Game”
What it should be: “You Really Really Belong at the Game, Like Seriously, We’re about to Pull a Fucking Expos Here If More People Don’t Start To Show the Hell Up.”
2. The Pittsburgh Pirates: “Pride. Passion. Pirates.” Pride? In having one of the top five draft picks every season? Passion? In helping hundreds of National League hitters boost their slugging percentages when they roll into PNC? How can anyone in Pittsburgh actually say this with a straight face after seventeen consecutive losing seasons?
Parallel Slogan: “Pride. Passion. Cuba Gooding Jr.”
What it should be: “Shame. Ambivalence. Pirates.”
3. The Oakland A’s “Green Collar Baseball” Apparently Oakland doesn’t fit into “blue-collar” or “white-collar” demographics. We’ll see if San Jose has the same feeling in two years. (All 174 Oakland fans just cursed me for bringing that up.)
Parallel Slogan: The Denver Broncos “Putrid Fluorescent-Throw-Up-Orange Collar Football”
What it should be: “Gangrene-Infested Collar Baseball”
4. The Atlanta Braves “The Excitement of Turner Field!” Nothing gets me more excited than enduring the 110-degree heat index during the blistering Atlanta summer at Turner Field! And did you see Yunel Escobar draw those 4 walks yesterday? Absolutely exhilarating! To the Brave’s PR department, I wouldn’t recommend using Turner Field as one of your main selling points.
Parallel Slogan: Isiah Thomas Basketball Camp “The Excitement of Henderson Elementary Gymnasium!”
What it should be: “The Excitement of Being Rushed to the Hospital from Turner Field with Heat Stroke”
5. The New York Mets “We Believe in Comebacks” You certainly do! They let the Phillies come back from a 7-game deficit with 17 games left to take the NL East in 2007 and then followed that up in 2008 by allowing them to come back from a 3.5 game deficit with 10 games to play. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t the Mets who are necessarily making the comebacks!
Parallel Slogan: The Detroit Lions “We Believe in 50-point Fantasy RB Scoring Weeks”
What it should be: “We Believe in Building Up Hope for 150 games and then Utterly Crushing it with a Sledgehammer”
Seriously, he just has magic inside now! Since when is that a banned substance?
6. The Giants “It’s Magic Inside” This probably isn’t the best slogan to throw around for a sport that’s still reeling from the whole steroids debacle. I hope this slogan was in place when Bonds played for the team. The unintentional comedy scale would have been off the charts. It can still apply to current reliever – and former Mitchell Report starter – Guillermo Mota, though.
Parallel Slogan: Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid: “It’s Magic Inside”
What it should (have been) be: “It’s Methyltestosterone HGH and Primobolan Enanthate Inside”
7. The Chicago White Sox “It’s Black and White” In a city that’s infamously segregated with the southside Sox being Chicago’s “black” team and the northside Cubs being the “white” team, way to further divide the city between race!
Parallel Slogan: 1930s Water Fountains “It’s Black and White”
What it should be: “It’s kind of black, but mostly just pasty white guys.”
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The first thing that comes to mind when I see “It’s Black and White” for the White Sox is the 1919 Black Sox. Why do they like reminding everyone of the biggest sporting scandal in the history of sports?
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