We’ve been talking about it for some time, and it’s finally here. The Vancouver Canadians have a new logo, and they gathered the press at the BC Sports Hall of Fame yesterday to demonstrate how proud they are of it.

And the media, they did flock.

The new look is a reconstruction of the awful logo the team used until 2007, with the old "C" now morphing into a "C’s", and the baseball image moving into the center of the image.

Also apparent is that the team colours are now red and white - gone forever is the old ‘Molson blue’, which will mean the ‘lucky’ road jersey will also head for the trash heap.

From Lyndon Little’s piece in today’s Vancouver Sun: 

"It was a major process," explained Kerr Thursday at an unveiling of the new team crest. "The whole thing took from between six to nine months." […] "The first three logos we submitted to Major League Baseball were rejected," said Kerr, the managing partner of Lignum Forest Products and chairman of Lignum Investments. "One of the stylized letter ‘C’ logos we submitted
apparently MLB felt too closely resembled the ‘C’ of the old Cincinnati Red Legs (considered baseball’s original majorleague team). The other, although we didn’t agree, was felt to be too close to the current ‘C’ used by the Chicago Cubs."

It’s certainly an improvement over the last logo. And the logo before that. And the one before that. Thinking about it, it’s probably the best logo the team has had.

But if I’m honest, the Vancouver Giants still have the best sports logo in town - by a mile.

Today’s Vancouver Province ran a full page work-up on the C’s, which featured some very interesting side bits of info. To wit:

• New Team President Andy Dunn [seen right] was gifted a share in the team as part of the package that lured him here. Co-owner Jeff Mooney described the team as having "made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

• Triple-A ball is becoming more and more of a public ambition for the team, with Dunn stating that he’ll be keeping an eye on the weather in April/May, to see for himself if Vancouver really is a place that is too cold/wet for ball in those months, as previous AAA ownership so often stated as a reason for fleeing the city.

• If Triple-A is too lofty an ambition, full season Single-A is being considered as an option.

• The new owners briefly considered renaming the team to the Vancouver Mounties (as we’ve been pushing here on Notes From The Nat forever, though we prefer the even older Vancouver Capilanos moniker), but after market researching found there was "no interest at all", they stuck with the Canadians.

Where to begin on all that?

First, let’s discuss the non-name change. The thinking behind sticking with the Canadians over the old Mounties name is apparently more about the fact that folks have, over time, got used to calling them ‘the C’s’, and that the Canadians extension of that is neither here nor there - kind of like how the Athletics have evolved over nearly a century into the A’s. Okay, I can see that.

But it’s still my opinion that, while the changes the C’s are going through right now are almost uniformly awesome, it’s a damn shame the name change won’t happen. Having worked in PR with the film industry a lot over the years, I know full well that focus groups are notoriously dumb, and that the data you get from them depends greatly on a) who they are, b) how you phrase questions, and c) what’s in the news that week.

Ask a bunch of people how they feel about calling a ball team the Vancouver Mounties after they’ve just watched a couple of RCMP officers taser a guy to death at the airport, and chances are they’ll be cool to the name change. Ask a bunch of people who’ve never been to a ball game what they prefer - Canadians or Mounties - and they’re going to go with the Canadians, because they don’t know the history associated with the Mounties name - or that the C’s name was a cynical marketing exercise designed to sell Molson beer.

As Ian Walker of the Vancouver Sun recounted yesterday in a piece about the C’s logos over the years:

It was at a well-attended press conference at the Hotel Vancouver in the spring of 1978 that Harry Ornest proudly announced the arrival of the Canadians and the resurrection of Triple A baseball on Vancouver’s
sports landscape.

"Now, you gotta know, Harry was one of the best promoters in the history of sport, so what he failed to mention was that he had made a brilliant promotional deal with Molson’s Brewery,"
recalls longtime sports columnist Greg Douglas. "So someone in the gathering asked if there was any tie in here with the fact that Molson and you have signed a promotional contract and that was the reason for the name — in recognition of their most popular beer — and Harry put his hand over his heart and said ‘I’m insulted! The reason I’m calling this team the Canadians is because I’m proud of my heritage, I’m proud of the fact that I’m a Canadian.’

"Of course, the next thing we see is the red, white and blue uniforms and out on the field all these ball players looking like beer bottles running around the bases."

If there’s one thing Walker’s retrospective makes clear, it’s that every change of the logo over the years has been a ‘minor’ change. Changing font here, adding a maple leaf there, removing the maple leaf, adding a V, dropping a V… it’s all tinkering in an effort to make the best of a bad situation, left to us by an old beer contract that.. Just. Never. Died.

Would people take a while to work out who the Vancouver Mounties were? Mayhaps. But hey, make the change that will pay off a bunch five years down the line, not the one that pays off a little bit tomorrow. 

On full-season Single-A ball being an option - that’s news to me. I can’t imagine Vancouver being admitted into the Midwest League due to simple geography, but even assuming that could be worked around, the Kane County Cougars are one heck of a successful MWL franchise, and they ain’t moving. 

Finally, on the weather… heck, if you can get 60k+ to turn up to an outdoor hockey game in Buffalo NY in January, you can lure 4-5k to a ball game in Vancouver in April. The big question will be, do you want to? The field will get ripped up, you’ll have rain-outs, the outfield would need to be entirely dug up and outfitted with a proper drainage system - perhaps even a heating system, like English football teams have - and though I know an outfield upgrade is in the works right now, you either have to schedule a ton of those early outings as road games, thus killing your opening day flow-on potential, or you have to spend a ton on promotion to get people motivated to come out on a cold Tuesday night.

It’s not impossible. It’s just hard. And if you’re going to bother, might it actually make more sense to just build a new facility, with a retractable roof, that can also be located near transit, closer to downtown, used for non-baseball events such as concerts, and seat more than 5,800 people?

You know… there’s a lot of land around Main Street Station that nobody is doing much with…

Side note: If you haven’t seen the new Canadians TV feature on the C’s website yet, now might be a great time to scoot on over. Rob Fai’s got some kids from Columbia Academy broadcasting school to throw together a video newsletter every few weeks, and it’s a decent show.