I recently received a Twitter inquiry about the Oakland Athletics' uniform sleeve patch. The A's sport the symbol of an elephant on their uniforms, a visual association that dates back to the franchise's second season.
Why an elephant? Hardly a symbol of athleticism, the Athletics' elephant has a unique story attached to it, one that dates back to July 10, 1902.
Athletics owner and manager Connie Mack explained it all in his 1950 autobiography, "My 66 Years in the Big Leagues:"
The insignia of our Philadelphia Athletics, as you know, is the White Elephant. The story of acquiring it is an interesting one. In 1902 the Baltimore Club forfeited its franchise in the newly formed American League. Its spot was filled by the New York Highlanders, “the acorn from which sprung the mighty Yankee oak.”
The astute John McGraw took advantage of the opportunity and jumped from the crumbling Orioles to the New York Giants, a leap to fame and fortune. When the sportswriters gathered around McGraw to fire a barrage of questions, one of the questions was, “What do you think of the Philadelphia A’s?”
“White elephants!” quickly retorted Mr. McGraw. “Mr. B. F. Shibe has a white elephant on his hands.”
Research shows that McGraw made these remarks on July 10, 1902, and the elephant connection has endured, albeit with many twists and turns.
Within weeks of McGraw's comments, the "white elephant" tag that he bestowed on the Philadelphia franchise started to take hold in the public imagination:
The "white elephant" designation became a rallying point for the young franchise in 1902. It was already being described as "famous" less than three weeks after McGraw made his remarks. The Athletics responded by winning the American League championship that season, the final one before the birth of the modern World Series the following year.
The team and their fans continued to embrace the symbol, and when they appeared in their first World Series in 1905—against John McGraw's New York Giants—they defiantly presented McGraw with a miniature elephant statue.
Although New York won that World Series, "white elephant" and the Philadelphia Athletics were now strongly attached to one another, a bond that would literally follow the team across the United States as it moved twice—first to Kansas City in 1955, then to Oakland in 1968.
The club formally adopted the elephant as a part of their visual identity in 1909, when they wore sweaters featuring a simple white elephant. The above logo dates to 1911 and was used by the team as part of their World Series press pin that season. It was also utilized on letterheads for many years.
After the heavily-favored Athletics lost 1914 World Series to the Boston Braves, Mack broke up the perennially contending team. The A's fortunes immediately plummeted—they finished in last place for the next eight consecutive seasons. Perhaps looking for a change of luck, the team put the elephant on their uniforms in 1918—in the form of a sleeve patch. It remained there for two seasons. This article, dated August 2, 1919, shows just how far from favor the previously lucky elephant had fallen:
Whatever the case, in 1920, the elephant made it to the front of the team's uniforms. Three distinct elephant variations were utilized in this decade. The first was a one-year wonder, worn only in 1920. It featured a crudely drawn blue pachyderm in a standing position. The 1921-23 version, also blue, was a bit more detailed. Finally, the version worn from 1924-27 depicted the white elephant as a white elephant. This jersey is associated with a franchise renaissance. After a decade of insignificance the Athletics returned to contention, finishing in second place in 1925 and 1927.
The seeds of a renewed A's dynasty were sown at this time. The 1928 team featured no less than seven future Hall of Fame players—plus Connie Mack, a future Hall of Fame manager. The team would win three straight pennants from 1929-31 and would come to be recognized as one of the great dynasties in the history of the sport. Perhaps anticipating this return to dominance, the club reverted back to their iconic Old English "A" uniforms for the 1928 season. Though still a big part of the visual identity of the franchise, the elephant would not make a return to the team's uniforms for more than two decades.
A Renewed Logo
The team's elephant symbol evolved. When the Athletics appeared in the 1931 World Series, the cover of the official program depicted a confident elephant, a saddle on its back with the familiar Old English "A." This illustration became the basis of what would eventually become the team's official logo. In the late '30s a baseball was added to the elephant's trunk.
1950 marked the golden anniversary of Connie Mack's managerial tenure in Philadelphia. The normally austere Athletics uniforms literally took on new color for that one season as part of the team's celebration. Also, for the first time since 1927, the elephant was returned to the uniform as part of a commemorative sleeve patch.
Interestingly, the team name—"Athletics"— didn't appear on the team's uniforms until their final season in Philadelphia, 1954. Team owner Connie Mack's half-century run as manager came to an end after the aforementioned 1950 season. Several disappointing years, combined with cutbacks in team expenditures and Mack family ownership discord, led to fan apathy. After the conclusion of the 1954 season the Athletics moved to Kansas City.
Typical of team management at this time was confusion regarding the team name and visuals:
West to Kansas City
When the franchise moved to Kansas City in 1955, they arrived with a refreshed elephant logo and a new set of uniforms. The new emblem bore a close resemblance to the one that represented them in Philadelphia, but instead of a baseball curled in its trunk, the new logo featured the elephant clutching a baseball bat, balanced atop a baseball. The Old English "A" was still there, a tangible connection to the team's earliest days in Philly.
The new uniforms were decorated with red "Athletics" script, both at home and on the road. Also gracing the uniform was an elephant—once again in the form of a sleeve patch.
The play of the Kansas City Athletics was no better than that of their Philadelphia predecessors. Within a few years of their arrival, local politicians grew vocal in their efforts to retire the elephant in favor of a more relevant local symbol.
On January 20, 1961—the day that John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States—the Athletics announced that they were retiring the elephant logo from their uniforms. Additionally, a city name would be added to the team's road uniforms for the first time in the history of the franchise.
Any signs of the elephant were few and far between in the early 1960s. The club slowly disassociated itself from the symbol in these years, a rare exception being this whimsical team letterhead from 1964:
The A's dropped their elephant mascot altogether in 1965 in favor of a Missouri mule, named in honor of team owner Charles O. Finley. This seems ironic, considering the political sentiments expressed only four years before. Finley had reimagined the team uniforms two years earlier, outfitting the club in green and gold, a revolutionary move that further served to distance the franchise from its Philadelphia roots.
Further West—on to Oakland
In 1968 the team was once again on the move, this time to Oakland. A talented nucleus of young players began to emerge at this time, something that certainly did not happen when the club moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City 13 years earlier.
The Athletics—more commonly known as "A's" during this era—won three consecutive World Series titles in 1972, 1973, and 1974.
History repeated in the late 1970s. The club fell on hard times and Finley once again sought a franchise shift, this time to Denver. That fell through, and the team was sold to Walter A. Haas, Jr., president of Levi Strauss & Co.
The A's enjoyed a successful first season under new management, finishing strike-split 1981 with the best record in the American League. A few more lackluster years followed, and in 1987 the team went back to basics, aesthetically speaking. New uniforms were unveiled which featured script "Athletics" letterforms, dark green trimmed in yellow gold. The typography was very reminiscent of the old Kansas City Athletics uniforms worn decades earlier. Abandoning all traces of modernity, the club reintroduced button-down uniforms and belted pants, arguably the most traditional look that the club had sported since the early days in Kansas City.
In early 1988 the Athletics announced that they were returning the elephant to their uniforms for the first time since 1960. This return to tradition coincided with a new golden era for the A's, culminating in (yet another) three consecutive World Series appearances, starting that season.
The elephant has remained a vital piece of the team's visual identity ever since.
One can drive from the site of A's former home in Philadelphia at 21st Street and Lehigh Avenue to their current home, the Oakland Coliseum, via Kansas City. The trip would span 2,930 miles. It would also span over 110 years of Athletics history, the whole journey connected by a visual homage to an offhand insult, dropped to a group of reporters on a summer day in 1902.
Today’s Wahoo can be traced back to baseball’s greatest promoter, Hall of Famer Bill Veeck. When Veeck obtained a controlling interest in the franchise in 1946, he looked to gin up fan interest in multiple ways. One of them was the adoption of a visual icon to represent the club. The Indians commissioned the J.F. Novak Company—an operation that still exists today—to create a new emblem for the team. The Novak Company specialized in the embroidery of police and firefighter patches (it still does.) This would suggest that the new emblem was intended to serve primarily as a sleeve patch.
A Novak draftsman, 17 year-old draftsman Walter Goldbach, created the first iteration of Chief Wahoo. Introduced in 1947, his version appeared on a wide range of goods and team publications. Goldbach has been quoted as saying that he was tasked with “creating a mascot that ‘would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm.’” In a 1999 Associated Press interview, Goldbach stated "the last thing on my mind was trying to offend anybody." No matter one's opinion of Wahoo, it's fair to say that no one, especially a 17 year-old artist, could have imagined the controversies that would envelop his creation decades later. (A footnote—I met Goldbach, in Cleveland, in 1997. He was selling prints of his original artwork.)
The following season, 1948, the Indians defeated the Boston Braves in the Fall Classic, thus vaulting the team (and Wahoo) to the top of the baseball world. Although the team’s uniforms continued to feature Goldbach’s version of Wahoo, the symbol had already started to morph into something that closely resembles the sleeve patch that the Indians are still wearing today.
Another World Series appearance in 1954 help to cement Wahoo’s place as a visible and prominent component of the club’s visual identity. The winds of public opinion had, however, already started to shift. In the 1940s, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) created a campaign to eliminate negative stereotyping of Native Americans in the media. This eventually led to a closer, more critical examination of Native American names and mascots in sports.
Nearly a quarter century later, in January 1972, the American Indian Center of Cleveland filed a lawsuit against the Indians for libel, slander, and defamation, stemming from the use of Chief Wahoo. The next season, under new ownership, the club rolled out a revamped version of the Chief, created by designer Leonard Benner. It eliminated the color red from Wahoo’s skin. It also depicted Wahoo at bat, an effect which served to minimize the Chief’s head. The new logo also reduced the size of Wahoo’s nose, and shadows were added. In a 1995 Akron Beacon Journal article, Benner said that he “streamlined him so Indian people wouldn’t be offended.” He also called the version that he was replacing "hideous."
This version of the Chief was utilized for a short time, until 1978, before being replaced with a close relative of the logo that we still see today.
The popularity of the 1989 film “Major League” helped to secure Wahoo’s status in Cleveland. World Series appearances in 1995 and 1997 also gave a boost to the Chief, despite multiple protests.
Flash forward to today. Chief Wahoo is no longer the team’s primary logo, having been replaced by a simple red block “C’ in 2014. It is used somewhat sparingly, most prominently on the team’s home caps and on the sleeves of all uniforms. But, even with a diminished presence, Chief Wahoo continues to incite both protest and pride, both of which we will likely hear about as the club navigates its way through this October run.
The eyes of the world are on Cuba this week as President Obama makes his historic visit to the island nation, the first for a sitting US President in nearly nine decades.
I had the good fortune to have visited Havana more than fifteen years ago, in December 1999. That year I designed Smoke: The Romance and Lore of Cuban Baseball, the definitive pictorial history of Cuban baseball. I traveled there with authors Peter Bjarkman and Mark Rucker, friends who knew the place, knew people there, and knew how to navigate the unique dynamics of visiting the country.
Armed with a license from the US Treasury Department, we ate, slept, talked, and watched baseball. We went to several games at Estadio Latinoamericano (site of the Rays vs Cuban National Team exhibition game on March 22,) as well as youth league games at ballparks in the Guanabacoa and Regla sections of Havana. The designer in me found visual inspiration everywhere. My having worked on the book for the better part of a year provided me with some small sense of what to expect.
We visited the Cuban Parliament and presented the book to the Vice President of the Council of Ministers, José Ramón Fernández (also the President of the Cuban Olympic Committee. A historic figure of Cuba’s revolution, he commanded defenses during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.)
This project and the experiences attached to it provided me with some deep insight into what the sport of baseball means to fans outside of North America.
The marketing of baseball has grown exponentially since my visit to Cuba—the world has gotten both smaller and flatter. In 2004 I was approached by MLB to assist in branding what would eventually become the World Baseball Classic. Our work has stood the test of time—2017 will mark the third WBC tournament, and the original look has endured, evolved, and has prospered.
Global opportunities abound. #Let’sWorkTogether
Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when few NFL teams featured a logo or decoration on their helmets. At the dawn of the 1960s, only four of the league's twelve teams—the Baltimore Colts, Los Angeles Rams, Philadelphia Eagles, and the Washington Redskins—wore something other than a blank helmet.
Today, there are several reasons why every NFL team (with the notable exception of the Cleveland Browns) features a decoration of some sort on their lids. Reason number one is aesthetics. 
Dear readers: In marketing parlance, this is a consummate “hot market” story,
On Wednesday night, October 21, the New York Mets defeated the Chicago Cubs 8-3, thus sweeping the National League Championship Series. New York would be appearing in its first World Series since 2000, with Game 1 slated for the following Tuesday evening, October 27.
Thursday morning, I received an email from Mike Zulla, the Mets’ Director of Creative Services. The newly-minted NL champs needed a logo, one that they could utilize for local sponsorship deals, and one that would not conflict with Major League Baseball’s own championship marks or sponsors. This identity would need to pass muster with MLB and would need to be created, approved, and finalized ASAP.
I sometimes liken myself to Winston Wolfe, so memorably portrayed by Harvey Keitel in the 1994 film “Pulp Fiction.” I solve problems. I am often asked to take on highly visible projects with little margin for error. When speaking to design groups and young creatives, I always stress the fact that coming up with attractive visuals is one thing; navigating the process can sometimes be quite another. This is one such example.
The work would necessarily travel down two parallel tracks, one of course built on optimism—a “World Champions” logo. The other approach was one of pragmatism—“League Champions.” All contingencies were to be covered here with flexibility at the forefront of the process.
Job one was recognizing what would and would not get past our friends at Major League Baseball. My nearly quarter century of collaboration with MLB on similar projects provided a great degree of comfort for everyone in terms of how to advance.
We agreed that a 48-hour turnaround for initial concepts was both reasonable and necessary. The foundation work that is always so critical at the front end of a job such as this—research, a brand audit, a formal articulation of goals—was simply not possible given the dynamics involved. Nevertheless, I proceeded with great optimism, for several reasons. Working with Mike was the primary factor—he is a seasoned pro, absolutely unflappable, even-tempered, a joy to work with. I had every confidence in the world that if I did my job, he would shepherd the work through on his end and would be able to build an internal consensus as we pushed things along. My trust in him was unwavering. Secondly, I was quite familiar with the franchise’s marketing and visual culture, having attended my first MLB game at the Mets’ longtime home, Shea Stadium, in September 1971.
Once we had an agreement on how to move forward, it was off to the races. My first round of sketches coalesced around a few distinct themes. I created the elements so that they could be mixed and matched with relative ease, given the fact that no logo of this prominence ever gets through the requisite maze of approvals without some kind of revision. This is actually a good thing. Various stakeholders get to have their say, consensus is built, and, hopefully, all interested partners are satisfied at the conclusion of the process.
The Mets’ signature colors of royal blue and orange would carry the day in all cases. The team’s familiar skyline logo, their “NY” ligature, and the idea of a pennant—a flag—were all pieces to be explored. Letterforms would need to be integrated in such a way so that they did not conflict with MLB’s own World Series branding. And it was critically important to deliver the work with depth and context attached to it in the form of activation samples—photo mapping that would help sell the work and make it come alive through real-world examples of what things might look like when rubber would meet road.
Round one was received with great enthusiasm and excitement. Let’s keep in mind the fact that all of this work was taking place at the same time as the World Series was being played. The logistics of presentation, approvals, and communication are always challenging at this time of the year, but the job moved forward in a straight line thanks to Mike and his colleagues at the Mets.
Several small rounds of revisions followed, and we received MLB approval on the afternoon of October 30, the day the Mets hosted their first Fall Classic game in fifteen years.
The Mets, alas, came up short. The Kansas City Royals won the World Series on November 1, their first world title in thirty years. However, New York still had much to celebrate in this pennant winner, a likeable and marketable young team with a bright future.
On December 7, the Mets announced a new long-term partnership deal with Coca-Cola. That morning, a group of Mets and Coke executives rang the opening ball of the New York Stock. Each of them held a commemorative bottle of Coca-Cola, emblazoned with our new logo.
Some jobs are sprints, others are marathons. The opportunity to be associated with excellence is always a great thing. I can’t wait to see this identity get rolled out this summer. I’m hopeful that the many Mets fans in my life, friends and family alike, embrace the results of this fast-moving project.
#Let'sWorkTogether
