New York Town Ball

[Big Yellow Flag]

I was doing some reading about old school town team baseball, or townball, amateur ball with towns going to head to head, playing for bragging rights and love of the game, and my first thought was that we need something like that here in the City. We have lots of different fandoms living side by side here, and it would be nice to see The Bronx take the field and put a beating on Queens, being able to root for my home borough over my A's fandom.

 

Stupidly, nothing like that really exists beyond little league, so I set out to create one (or, at least, the uniforms for one). So far, only The Bronx is done, but I have plans for all five boroughs (and possibly some of Long Island/mainland neighbors if it goes well). The only rule I set is that no borough gets to wear blue and orange. They're the whole city's colors, not belonging to any one borough. I like to dig through the history of the boroughs to find appropriate colors.

 

With all that in mind... Here goes.

 

 

The Bronx

 

No Bombers here, folks. My home borough of The Bronx was named for Jonas Bronck, the first European settler in the area and the reason our The must always be present. His origins are relatively unknown, but the borough's official historian established in the nineties that Bronck was from Småland. The team's colors come from that region's very lovely crest.

 

The Bronx, of course, wears Yankee pinstripes (pinstripes are really hard to do in MS Paint) in Småland blue, with a big red B replacing the NY. The B is heavily inspired by the German ß to give it a little bit of extra character, and has a yellow fill to work all three colors into the front of the jersey and because it looks cool. I couldn't find a good way to work the T in there; it was on top of the B until the final draft when I realized that made it look too Christian. Cap is Småland blue with the same red and yellow B front and center and a nice red brim. Going down to the socks, the Yankees wear stripeless socks, so The Bronx does, too, with yellow sannies to keep all the colors looking nice and as a nod to my favorite ballclub out in Oakland.

 

Thoughts? Do you love it? Do you hate it? Is it a dumb project? Should I shut up and just post the concepts? 

 

Brooklyn is next, should be coming up toward the end of this holiday weekend.

 

-BYF

[Whittier S]

Fantastic idea for a project. Would love to see Harlem, East Village, Chinatown, Williamsburg, Montauk, Fire Island (though I doubt it's wide enough to support a baseball field!), you could go on and on with this.

 

I wouldn't color the inside of the shirt. It's not realistic, and it's throwing off how to see the color balance in the uniform. I'm not sure about the red belt, though I'd be surer if I could see it without the blue inside.

[Big Yellow Flag]

I'm going to stick to the boroughs for now, but I may delve a little deeper and look at some neighborhoods and suburbs afterwards.

 

Good point on the inside of the shirt, I've fixed that. I gave them a red belt because I wanted a uniform that was very clearly not the Yankees, even though blue pinstripes are the obvious choice for The Bronx. Two colors on the cap, a band of red on the sleeves, and a red belt give it enough differentiation that a Yankees jersey isn't a borough jersey and The Bronx isn't just the Yankees with a different logo.

 

I also noticed one of the belt loops was still green, a remnant from a failed early attempt to pay homage to the borough's large Irish population. That's been fixed.

 

I guess you could call this an update? Working on Brooklyn now.

 

[Whittier S]

Improving. I think you have color balance issue going on with the socks and stirrups. Yellow is oddly distributed throughout the uniform. I think your logo will be more solid and stand out better if there were yellow going all the way around it.

[Big Yellow Flag]

Realized you were right, and once I was working on the stirrups I realized the yellow wasn't adding anything, just made it look a little bit muddled. An updated (and, I think, final) version for The Bronx.

 

 

Brooklyn should be up tonight.

[Big Yellow Flag]

Going out to Kings County... This borough has a long baseball history, obviously first with the Dodgers until the 50s and then with the Cyclones, who have been embraced by the community and are a fun way to spend a summer's day (even if it does take two hours plus each way). For the borough's town ball team, the immediate instinct was to play Dodgers dress up, and I had to fight to resist the easy way out.

 

Brooklyn

 

At first glance, this is a Dodgers uniform. The spoon-like piping around the neck and down the buttons remains. The cap looks even farther back in Brooklyn history, to the pre-Dodgers Brooklyn NL clubs, white with blue pinstripes and a nice Brooklyn B (Is there an easy way to do pinstripes on MS Paint? It's not easy), again separating a Brooklyn lid from an old Dodgers cap. Jersey script is taken from a Cyclones alternate that I've always liked, with a BKLYN abbreviation for the darn hipsters, with the B the Cyclones wear replaced with the same Brooklyn Robins B on the cap. On the stirrups, we have three white stripes, a holdover from an earlier attempt at a third color (yellow again, funnily enough) to tie in the whole flag before I scrapped it because it just didn't look right.

 

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Deletions? Expletives? Explanations? Et cetera?

[Whittier S]

The straight-on B with the arced KLYN looks awkward together. One solution would be to enlarge the B in the wordmark.

[Big Yellow Flag]

I'll play around with it after this whole write-up. For our third foray, we're staying on Long Island, with Kings County's feminine counterpart. This borough, strangely enough, was named after a Portuguese woman named Catherine, although she did have some claim to her own borough as Queen of England through her marriage to King Charles. She also has a lovely claim to fame as having brought tea drinking to the English people from Portugal, but I didn't work that into the uniform.

 

Our inspiration for this borough's townball team comes from Catherine's family, the House of Braganza. The House of Braganza's arms gave us our colors, which are a nice break from the heavy use of blue. The logo comes from the same place, as the little shield with five points inside (seen here on Wikipedia) made a great mark for one of the five boroughs.

 

Had some more issues with color balance, I'm working on it. Not entirely sold on the red stripe on the socks, or the plain white racing stripe. It was nice to go a little "retro" with a pullover and a colored jersey.

 

With all that in mind...

 

Queens

 

My thanks to @Whittier S, by the way, for sticking with me and giving some comments on every iteration I've posted thus far. It's much appreciated.

[Whittier S]

You're welcome.

Green and blue are hard to put against each other because they're so close to each other on the spectrum. I'd recommend a white outline around the crest. 

[Big Yellow Flag]

I'll give it a shot. Here's an update on Brooklyn. You're right, the bigger B looks better. I don't know if it's perfect, but it is better.

 

[Big Yellow Flag]

And an update for Queens. White outline really does make everything look better.

 

 

Manhattan is next. Should be a fun time.

[Big Yellow Flag]

Moving to the island, a borough so stuck up they took the name pf the city as the name of their county, leaving the rest of us to come up with other names. This is a trendy borough, not in the way that Brooklyn likes to think it is (they were trendy before it was cool, though, so it's okay), but in the sense that its residents very much enjoy being fancy and cool and on top of the latest trends in fashion, technology, causes, et cetera. Y'all know what I'm talking about.

 

Manhattan

 

Manhattan has to be on top of the trends, which means they're wearing black for no reason other than that we need a black jersey. Combined with the fact that the the New York Giants were the last MLB club to play within the borough and the fact that the M train has an orange bullet (the shape with the letter), black and orange was a logical choice. The M bullet appears on the chest of a black jersey, under an orange cap with the same white M and a black brim. Clean white pants (although I can't resist the different color belt loops, a little flash of color in an orange belt, and it's all topped off (or bottomed off, I guess?) with black socks carrying four orange stripes and one white stripe in the middle. Manhattan, you know.

 

Staten Island is next, which might be followed on more local neighborhood teams and/or suburbs. Taking suggestions for that list.

 

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? Deletions? Expletives? Explanations? Et cetera?

[Whittier S]

Manhattan is spot on.

Suggestions for neighborhoods:
Harlem
Chinatown
Fire Island
Montauk
Greenwich Village
Williamsburg
Southampton
Crown Heights
Flatbush

[Big Yellow Flag]

3 minutes ago, Whittier S said:

Manhattan is spot on.

That's all I ever wanted to hear.

 

Some of those neighborhoods will definitely make an appearance.

[Paul Lucas]

Nice job!

 

A few neighborhoods? Wash. Heights, Inwood, Riverdale, Castle Hill, Sugar Hill, Eastchester, East NY, Jamaica, Astoria, Coney Is., Park Slope, LIC, Alphabet City, Greenpoint, UWS, El Barrio, Bay Ridge, Forest Hills, Bklyn/Jackson Heights, Bed-Stuy. There's so many to choose from. If you wanna take it back, try Seneca Village.

[Big Yellow Flag]

16 hours ago, Paul Lucas said:

Nice job!

 

A few neighborhoods? Wash. Heights, Inwood, Riverdale, Castle Hill, Sugar Hill, Eastchester, East NY, Jamaica, Astoria, Coney Is., Park Slope, LIC, Alphabet City, Greenpoint, UWS, El Barrio, Bay Ridge, Forest Hills, Bklyn/Jackson Heights, Bed-Stuy. There's so many to choose from. If you wanna take it back, try Seneca Village.

You somehow managed to name all the neighborhoods I've lived in. Pretty cool, will definitely do those (and others).

 

Staten Island will be up momentarily, having some trouble with the uploading.

[Big Yellow Flag]

Fixed the issue, so here we go. Staten Island is notable for a few things. One, nobody really likes it. Two, home to two thirds of the City Council's GOP caucus. Three, a baseball stadium built to showcase views of the World Trade Center that opened in June 2001. Four, of course, is the ferry. When you have a borough probably best known for the vehicle you take to get away, you can't resist using that for inspiration.

 

Staten Island

 

We have here a slightly wavy Tequila Sunrise in double blue. Call it a Tequila Beach Trip, I guess. The waves themselves come from the borough's flag, as does the light blue. The second blue is just a blue that looks nice, I'll admit to that. The logo that looks slightly dollar sign-like, but I don't mind that. The main look has a light blue S and a dark I, but two one color versions exist; one appears on the cap and the other exists so the light blue didn't feel bad.

 

And so ends the five borough teams. I've got some ideas for neighborhoods already, as well as some adjusted rules to tack on to the Blue and Orange ban, you might see one of those today, and they'll continue after the holiday beginning tonight.

[Paul Lucas]

I'd love to see a Ferry Alternate for SI. 

 

Also, that's a very classy emblem they have.??

[Big Yellow Flag]

2 minutes ago, Paul Lucas said:

I'd love to see a Ferry Alternate for SI. 

 

Also, that's a classy emblem they have. 

Early drafts had a little boat on top of the Tequila Beach Trip, but I scrapped it because it seemed a little too hokey, and because it couldn't be in the proper color anyway because of the Blue and Orange rule I established at the beginning. I stuck to it so well for the first four, I couldn't bring myself to break it at the finish line.

[Whittier S]

The dollar sign is a miss to me. Maybe use the Staten Island Lighthouse for the I part?