This is "Captain Jack," the new mascot of our minor league baseball team, the Captains. We used the have the Captains, then we had the Swamp Dragons, then we had the Sports. In 2009, we have the Captains again, although they're in a different league and they're re-branded.
You've got to do what you've ogt to do if you're trying to make minor league baseball successful in this town, as it was wildly so in the late 1980's and early 1990"s. Believe it or not, that was a long time ago.
I have stayed silent on this since they revealed this guy and announced his name, but I remain silent no more. The history of the name "Captains" has nothing to do with pirates or Johnny Depp movies. It has everything to do with the guy our city is named after, Captain Henry Miller Shreve. He was a riverboat Captain who history tells us was perfectly honest and honorable, not to mention reliable.
It's clear the baseball team's management has no sense of our city's history. This incarnation of The Captain flies in the face of all of that.
I hope my feelings don't matter. I want them to be successful. We're all better off if they are. In order to be so, the guys who are running the enterprise need to learn a lot more about the place they now call home.
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Thursday, February 26, 2009
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1 comment:
You and I are soooo on the same page as this. What the feller's here don't realize is that the name "Pirates" has a negative connotation with the CFL "Pirates".
And so what if that was like early 90's...people have loong memories.
IMHO, if they wanted to create a "cartoon mascot" they could've gotten a sailor character much in the same vein as "Popeye" with muscled forearms and a Stevadore's cap and really gone out.
Sorry to poo-poo their choice but branding needs to be a thorough examination of all aspects of image. If I had been asked about the new name, the first thing I would've said is "we've had a Pirate's sports franchised before that the public knows was: A.) run by bozos from Canada B.) failed miserably C.) left a bad-taste with everybody who even remotely had anything to do with the franchise.
Sure it's baseball...but a brand is something that becomes instantly recognizeable whether real or perceived. Why don't these folks "get it"? They failed on two counts: not considering the name-association failure of Pirates in this market AND not considering the historical association the team has had with the community.
I wish them well but this branding shows a real fundamental lack of understanding this market's past and is..well: dumb, dumb, dumb!
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