Quote:
Originally Posted by Jayyburdd
I love that blizzard pattern on the last two jerseys!
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Thanks! It was the first time I've ever experimented with something like that so I'm really glad you like it.
After a bit of a break (went out of state for a few days to visit my sister), I'm back with another entry. Coming up here is the last team that I've already got 100% prepared; everything else after this team is going to be a brand new design made after I started posting these. That process is gonna take some time in general, but I think I can stick to a schedule of about one new team a week, perhaps more often. I had a team set up for Austin to go after this one but I'm really unsatisfied with it compared to these others, so I've scrapped it completely - I have a whole new name in mind and a neat idea that I think will work. That team probably won't be next, but we'll see. Anyway, here's WTX!
WEST TEXAS BLACKBIRDS (El Paso)
Logos/Uniforms (Imgur)
I'm getting a little bit avant-garde here with this team, I suppose. If I hadn't mentioned it at the end of the Syracuse post, it wouldn't even be obvious that this team is in El Paso. Like a number of teams already posted in this thread, I've had the designs done for years on a team in El Paso known as the West Texas Blackbirds. I think there are good reasons at play for each decision that I've made here, so let me try to sell you on it.
I've never been a big believer in MLB's chances of expansion into Mexico; not that I don't think it would succeed (it probably
would succeed), but I think the combination of expanding into a new country, especially one with a language barrier, along with MLB already having a nice tidy partnership with the Mexican League, is too many hurdles to cross realistically. (Havana is absolutely never happening; if MLB is expanding into a Spanish-speaking market, I'd give at least 80% odds that it's San Juan in Puerto Rico. But I'm not sure if any of those are really on the table, and I don't really have plans for them either.)
So why El Paso? Because it's a way for MLB to draw in (some) Mexican fans without having the MLBPA draw the line at a Spanish-speaking city or lengthy travel to CdMX. The media market numbers I typically use are not super kind to El Paso, but those are statistics that are only counting American heads and TV sets, and Juarez is more than double El Paso's size in population. Even discounting that the average Mexican fan is probably less likely to cross the border just to see a game, I think this pushes El Paso up into the territory where a major sports team could be successful. Apart from Montana and the western parts of the Dakotas, El Paso is also one of the parts of the contiguous US that is the most isolated from major pro sports (El Paso is closer to Phoenix than it is to San Antonio), so it oughta be worth a shot - there are a lot of people there that aren't being served by major American sports at the moment.
Why "West Texas"? To be perfectly honest, I made that choice in a split-second several years ago and have had it that way ever since. But I think it works here. For one, a team in El Paso would, I think, try to draw fans from the underserved parts of Texas like Amarillo, Laredo and the like. I don't think the potential of alienating fans in New Mexico is that big a deal (and if you're like me, you're also adding a team in Albuquerque; more on that to come), and fans from Mexico won't be as attached to the name "El Paso" anyway. I also liked the look of the abbreviation WTX (even though it appears that people don't actually say that, it's something that I'm leaning into) and abbreviating El Paso isn't satisfying. (EP and ELP both look wrong.) West Texas is a label that is applied pretty liberally and can take up a big chunk of land, and it seems OK to me that a team in El Paso might try to stake a claim to that.
And why Blackbirds? That's the easy part, actually. Different species of blackbird exist all over the world, but the primary American species is the yellow-headed blackbird, which lives in large parts of the United States, but are commonly seen in the Trans-Pecos and panhandle regions of Texas while being absent in the rest of the state. It's exactly the kind of bird that seems a natural fit for a baseball team - in fact, I just learned in writing this post that this bird in particular is related to the oriole.
I have had this logo saved up, 80% of the way done, for years, so I am appreciating this thread more for convincing me to finish it. I do all of my logos in Inkscape, and the reason why I originally had this blackbird at all was because I was using it as a test to teach myself how to use the program - in this case, digitizing a logo that I had already done on paper. This is a yellow-headed blackbird, the same species that can be found in El Paso, and so it is sensible to me that the color scheme should be dark gray, black and yellow; dark gray with black so that outlines can be visible while still making it a blackbird. A banner along the bottom in a style that I think is sorta reminiscent of the Southwest, and that's all you really need! It's also nice having the banner there since, as you might be able to guess, I really wasn't confident in my ability to draw a bird's feet.
Lot of choices here, and I've never been quite sure what the best option was for a secondary logo here. But if you want options, there are lots of them here. (I like using just the bird head personally.) Most should be pretty self-explanatory, but the fourth logo from the left features the outline of Trans-Pecos Texas, an area bounded by the Rio Grande to the west, the Pecos River to the east, and the New Mexico state line to the north. (The far western tip of the state, where El Paso is actually located, if you're looking on a map.)
Jerseys and caps:
A bunch of options here, since I wasn't totally sold on any one look as the best for this team. I definitely thought the team should wear gray pinstripes at home, but there are also two different shades of a gray uniform (a traditional road gray and a darker one in the team's actual gray color) and even a yellow vest alt that could fit either home or away. Hats for all occasions too, although the black cap with yellow bill works with all the jerseys, I think.
That's all for El Paso/WTX! As mentioned above, I'm not sure what city will be next on my list, but I'm hoping to have another one out by the end of this week.