The new Tampa Bay Rays logo - hit or miss?

The Boston Celtics and Green Bay Packers are proving this year that you can win with green. So why are the new Tampa Bay Rays logos and uniforms stepping back towards generic?

The Tampa Bay Rays (nee “Devil Rays”) unveiled a new logo this week. In addition to now formally being known as the Rays (as in “ray of sunshine” instead of “manta ray fish”), the Rays have adopted a dramatically different color scheme. When the team entered the league in 1998, they sported white jerseys with a gradient of blue-green-yellow in the lettering; later, these uniforms changed to a more subdued dark green, which was a step in a nice direction.

Now, the Rays have dumped that color scheme too, in favor of new Tampa Bay Rays uniforms - blue with light blue accents and a “touch of gold”.

The new Tampa Bay Rays logo is atrociously average. Gone are the 90s hey days when teams got a little bit creative with their colorings, departing from the ultra-traditional “Cubbie blue” or “Yankee navy”. The new Rays logo not only incorporates boring blue but also places same-colored “Rays” lettering over top of a baseball diamond. It’s eerily reminiscent of some other ‘ays - mainly the Toronto Blue Jays and San Diego Padres, who both changed their colors, logos and uniforms in 2003.

Of the 32 major league teams, only 7 do not have blue or red as a primary logo color - the Orioles, White Sox, Rockies, Marlins, Athletics, Pirates and Giants. The Diamondbacks and Astros receive honorable mention for using “brick red”, and the Astros receive extra credit for actually moving away from a navy blue color scheme. But that’s it.

We’re not picking on classic teams like the Cubs and Tigers, but rather teams who choose not to think outside the box when branding their team. How can you tell the Rays apart from all of the other navy/light blue teams playing right now? Maybe by their dismal record but that’s about it.

That’s not to say that blue and red can’t make attractive logos anymore, but if you have the chance to design something new for your team, why not try to stand out rather than change for the sake of saying “We made a change”? The Rays were one of only a handful of teams who stood out and stuck by green as a primary uniform color (it is no more ubiquitous in other sports either). Now all they have are some clean, new Tampa Bay Rays uniforms that look like they were pieced together from the scraps of other recent uniform redesign projects.