There’s a baseball team in Florida, and they’ve got some image problems. There’s a guy who hurls baseball bats at umpires, and another fellow who has had multiple restraining orders placed upon him by the wife he keeps threatening to kill. They are the only franchise in the majors to have never made it to the playoffs and have finished last in all but one of their seasons.

I’m talking, of course, about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Yesterday, the bad boys of baseball finally announced that they were down with Jesus and dropped the “Devil” from their name. Ladies & gentlemen meet your The Tampa Bay Rays. They also showed off a new logo, a generic typographic treatment with a miniscule starburst element awkwardly dropped in right where the tail and the bowl of the R meet. If I had to guess, I’d say it was almost certainly designed by Todd Radom, the go-to guy MLB uses to keep uniforms looking uniform. Here’s a selection of logos he’s designed:

Unfortunately this isn’t the place to chart the birth, evolution, and eventual death-by-standardization of baseball logos. I’ll save that for my next little column about the crushing effects of design’s newfound ubiquity and the terrifying logical conclusion of a specialized design industry. Right now I just want an excuse to show my top ten (American) (major league) baseball logos!

A few notes before we begin: This is a list of logos, emblems, and marks – not of their utilization on uniforms. I’m as drawn to the stalwart bedrocks of baseball’s visual history as I am to the short-lived experiments and stunning outliers, but the majority of this list covers dead teams or hidden pasts of current franchises. There is no proper methodology I’m using here, but I do appreciate illustrative images with a certain vestigal evidence of amateurish origins. All images are taken from Chris Creamer’s amazing and exhaustive sportslogos.net.

10: New York Yankees (1936 – present)
I include this not because it’s one of my favorite logos, but just to note that the Yankees logo features a top hat covered in the stars and stripes. It might as well feature Steinbrenner in a three-piece suit clutching your rent check and beating up your kid brother.

9: St Louis Browns (1936 – 1951)
A really stellar logo of the sort rarely used in baseball, the traditional shield & logotype. Between the vertical lines, the color palette, and the figurative form, this feels like something out of the German football league, the Budesliga, which I may or may not have just spelled correctly. Clumsy in a charming way – the type, especially, is of an era where we just said of type, “fit ‘er in!”, and is not without its charm.

8: Toronto Blue Jays 1977-1996
Man do I love this logo, even though I do think it fails to streamline all the elements into one cohesive whole. There’s something very perfect about the red/blue/sky blue color palette, the inline type feels like a natural extension of baseball’s use of type, and the geometric bird face is so appealing. All the more so when compared to the current Blue Jays logo, which suffers from the unwritten law that any animal seen in a modern logo must be pissed off and, ideally, metallic.

7: Chicago Cubs 1949-1961
In the post-war era, as the balance of world powers began to shift, we briefly experimented with being the cutest nation on earth.

6: Philadelphia Phillies 1970-1991
Formally, pretty awesome.

5: Los Angeles Dodgers 1958-Present
When the Dodgers left Brooklyn, and broke my father’s little heart, they took with them a classic logotype upon which they wisely built. The logo was tilted, a meteoric baseball was added, and something genuinely graceful was born. The designers respected the past by adding a totally different element. One day I’ll write about the wonder of continuity and thoughtful change, but for now a nice and simple logo.

4: St Louis Cardinals 1960s-1990s
Picture it on baby blue. Later on they’d abandon the scotch typeface, but keep the great balancing cardinals. An illustrated logo that’s lasted the test of time and focus groups – a rare bird.

3: Montreal Expos 1961-1991
Amazingly, this logo is not meant to say ELB. It’s meant to be as E D and B, combining to form a big old M. Expos de Montreal Baseball. Roughly 25% of L train riders wear this ballcap at any given time.

2: Oakland Athletics 1988-present (though based off the old Philadelphia Athletics logo)
That elephant is balancing on a baseball!!!

1: Mr Met 1963-present
Then again, I’m biased.