HarbourCats show the threads

Friday night at the Yates Street Tap House, the HarbourCats hosted a media event to roll out the complete set of jerseys for their inaugural season. Three jerseys in all - the home, the road, and the now obligatory "third" jersey that usually finds its way into the home rotation once or twice a home-stand.

Three Up...

Three Down!

The home jersey is a button-down bright white jersey, with a navy blue panel under the armpit on both the body and arm. The team name arcs across the front in a caps-locked Serif font proving one thing - the name Harbourcats has a lot more letters than you probably thought when it's on a jersey. Navy blue player numbers adorn the left front, and middle back of the jersey in a typical block jersey-number font. A crisp white pant with a thin blue stripe down the side of the leg complete the home look.

The road jersey is the same cut and style, with Navy as the main colour and grey under arm patches. The same number font is used, this time in white. A much more compact "Victoria" in a scripted font runs across the jersey on a slight angle towards the left shoulder. Away pants are a matching grey, with the same navy stripe down the side of the leg.

The third jersey, again made the same, uses the lighter blue found in the HarbourCats logo, with navy underarms. The logo sticks with the "Victoria" script, but this time - it goes straight across the jersey in a navy blue font with white outline. The numbers match both the outline style of the name, and the font of the other jersey numbers.

All items of clothing sport the well known Nike swoosh.

Headgear wise, there are two hats in play to start the season: A single block navy "V" outlined in white on a grey hat with navy blue brim complements the road uni, while one of the oddest design items in the set - the home hat is worn with both the standard home jersey and the third jersey. The home hat is a solid navy blue hat and brim with an overpowering H and C logo, the H placed over the C. Or is the C over the H. Or are they the same size? Isn't there a famous french hockey team that's done that? Or the NC Tar Heels? Or even the West Coast League logo? Is HarbourCats two words now? I'm so confused!

The hat seems to make no sense to this logo-happy blogger. In fact, I'm a bit taken aback by the sheer variety and mismatch of all the pieces together. I count six different fonts in play now:

• Original HarbourCat logo text
• "Harbourcats" jersey name
• "Victoria" jersey name
• "V" hat logo
• "HC" hat logo
• Jersey numbers (expected)

And that's not counting the scripted font being used twice - once with border and once without, once on an angle, and once straight across! It's as if a design team created a bunch of samples, and someone said "I'll take one of each".

What does it all matter? This isn't fashion corner, this is a baseball blog! Will it cost us runs, lose us games... probably not. I just think that for a team looking to build an identity and make an entity recognizable in the community, the KISS principle may have been a better way to go. And use the cat logo for god sake... If the internet teaches us nothing else, it confirms that everyone likes an angry / grumpy cat!