Great gallery of vintage baseball logos

When Amy and I went to Minneapolis the other weekend, we took in a could of Twins games. Since it happened to be interleague, we got to watch them play pound the Milwaukee Brewers. It was sometime in the first few innnings of the first game that we fell in love with the retro Brewers logo above.

I don’t know when they changed to a newer logo, but plenty of people were still wearing the old M+B-in-a-baseball-mitt logo on their T-shirts. It was awesome.

So it was doubly cool to dive into this collection of vintage baseball logos from loads more teams.

It doesn’t include every logo ever — the blogger who compiled it says that he chose only the ones that were “interesting” to him — but there are enough to get a sense of some of the logo evolution.

Three things that I noticed right off the bat:

1. Many of the logos have evolved dramatically over the years, and sometimes elements get lost that I wish hadn’t.
2. There are clear “trends” in logo design. A lot of retro logos have rounded single letters that are pretty similar to the Brewers one. And a lot of the modern logos have computer-aided 3-D effects.
3. The Napster logo appears to have been ripped right off from the old Chicago Cubs logo. Go check for yourself!

I also loved that the Oakland As used to be the “Swingin’ As”.

Credit for unearthing this post to Draplin, who always has fantastic design links.