Last night the Nats were down in the top of the 9th, but took the lead when Adam LaRoche hit a 2 run home run off of former National Joel Hanrahan. Unfortunately, a half an inning later, the Pirates did the same thing, and won on a walk off 2 run blast. But I’m not here to talk about the game. There are plenty of great websites that give you recaps of individual games. This one rarely, if ever, does that. Instead, I want to talk about how Joel Hanrahan looks. Specifically, that he looks more like his team logo than any player I can think of since Nap Lajoie.
This is Joel Hanrahan:
and this is the Pirates logo:
What’s going on here? Look at this!
Does anyone know if he is doing this on purpose? Does he realize that this has happened? I’d really like to know. And is there anyone out there you can think of that looked ever MORE like their logo or mascot than what Hanrahan has pulled off here?
I referenced back to Nap Lajoie, because, well, he played for the Cleveland Naps at the time. Lajoie was a big star who jumped from the NL Phillies to the fledgling AL, and the Cleveland team had a write-in contest to see what their new name should be, since nobody liked the Cleveland Bluebirds. Rather than coming up with something like the Napoleons (which could also reference the French Army, still considered a pretty tough group, less than 100 years after conquering all of continental Europe) or even the Lajoies, which would reference nothing but the last name of the star, the fans literally named the team the Cleveland Naps. Sounds like quite an exciting team to see in person. Their slogan was, “Heeeeeey, Cleveland, it’s Nap time”. They couldn’t figure out why nobody showed up at games, while the soon to be narcoleptic population of the city didn’t realize that a team was even being marketed.
For the sake of comparison, here is what the Napoleon Lajoie looked like:
and here is what the Cleveland Naps mascot looked like:
Of course, this all begs the question, would you rather be cheering for the Washington Harps or Zims? How about the Washington Wilsons? And if there was ever a reason to call up Atahualpa Severino…