Quote:
Originally Posted by txranger
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I'd like to be using these as well, if that's all right. They'll feel so... right... for Midway Field. Just feels like a perfect fit.
If requests are being taken, I could really use a logo in this style for a team called the New York Hawks. Technically, this is the same team I've also called 'Manhattan White Hawks' in the past. It's just that... well... when I put my teams in a list on paper, that 67-foot long name really stuck out like a sore thumb. I've since thought New York Hawks sounded much more organic, and in many ways, much more real.
For curiosity's sake, the Hawks can be traced back to the old Empire City BBC of the 19th century. It's not a direct link, like the Bruins enjoy, but there are ties. Those ties come in the form of one Melis Rosenberg - not so affectionately known as 'Old Rosey' to most who knew him. As a player, he was an utterly mediocre back-up shortstop, but Empire City kept him around because of his razor-sharp business sense. He found a way to keep the team active, while other clubs were dropping like flies. Even if the other players didn't so much enjoy his not-so-charming personality, they appreciated his knack for keeping them employed.
Eventually, Empire City did fail, and folks went on with their lives. A much older and much wiser Old Rosey founded the New York Metropolitans club long about 1892 or so. Using his freshly acquired wealth, he was able to build up a team that was dangerous from the very beginning, and many championships found their way to Manhattan under his watchful eye.
By the time Old Rosey passed away, only the most dedicated of baseball historians remembered him as a player, but most knew him well as a business man.
Under a much more penny-pinching regime, the Metropolitans became the Gothams in the 19-teens, and, like most everyone else, ran into some trouble once the Depression took root.
They were purchased by William Sheepcote in 1931, (oddly, the English-born Sheepcote would become a symbol of the American spirit, and was a man so willfull and stubborn that when he was all but eaten alive with untreatable cancer in the 1940s, he "went out of his way" to die of a heart attack instead), the Gothams became the Hawks for the CBC's inaugural season in 1932, and began a brand new life in the spectacular EMPIRE Stadium.
Today, EMPIRE Stadium is holy ground in the world of baseball, and features a visually stunning statue of a hawk with wings spread wide just beyond the centerfield wall. That centerfield is often compared to an abyss, and the player charged with fielding the position is often hailed as baseball's finest player, just because of the wide expanse of territory he has to cover.
Few batters, they say, have a bat heavy enough to reach that centerfield wall, so the fact that the tip of the Hawk statue's beak was bent slightly by a Tommy Mathews home run some time in the 1950s is a very celebrated flaw.
Sorry again for rambling on so long. Just that when I start writing it just kinda flows like a river. Also, I really like writing all this stuff, so the fact that a few of you seem to like reading it kinda fires up my inspiration a bit.
