This may be an obvious statement, but work with me here: the New York Knicks historic championship win this month brings into mind the power of a team’s logo.
If you’ve been here in New York City, how many Knicks logos have you been exposed to in the past month? Adorning oneself with team’s logo can an exercise in unity – if I see someone wearing the same logo, I can assume we have at least one thing in common. However, a team’s logo can have so many different connotations based on who is wearing it and how they do so.
But, enough about the Knicks – let’s pivot a bit and keep talking about sports logos, but let’s talk about the other, (usually) even more popular New York sports team and it’s even more popular logo.
As obvious as it might be, it remains worth asking: what’s the deal with the Yankees logo? Why is it everywhere, and why does it seem to have so little to do with the team it represents, or even baseball itself? Perhaps the question most relevant to our current moment is this: why is this symbol, amongst all other sports logos (and logos in general) something that’s seen so frequently?
Enter the Village Psychic school of symbolic analysis.
Similar to the much memed about Four Stages of Simulation from Jean Baudrillard, there’s an even more applicable philosophical framework that we can use to unpack this phenomenon, from an essay titled Theory of Symbols by Northrop Frye. This system was originally used for poetry, but I find it useful for visual symbols as well.
1. The Literal Phase (Symbol as Motif):
It’s a Baseball Team Logo, Dummy (or, at least it is now)
At first, it’s a logo for a baseball team. Wearing the logo means that you are a fan of the team. The symbol now emblazoned on apparel the world over, interestingly, has origins outside baseball. It was part of a police medal designed by Louis Comfort-Tiffany, and was likely adopted as a Yankees logo by team co-owner William “Big Bill” Devery, who was also the NYPD’s first chief.
So, it gets used for a baseball team, but not just any baseball team For the uninitiated, this team went on to have the most World Series wins of any team (27), and please keep in mind that the team with next most is St. Louis with 11. The team has perrenially been a home for baseball’s name-band players – Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Joe DiMaggio, Derk Jeter, and more recently in history, Alex Rodriguez and Aaron Judge. The team has long been a talent magnet, so it should come as no surprise that fans of the team would want to wear its logo proudly.
2. The Descriptive Phase (Symbol as Sign):
New York State of Mind Cultural Saturation
Next, wearing the logo means you might be a fan of the team, but wearing it becomes about being a fan of New York City, where the team is from. The popularity of the Yankees logo is partially due to the team’s success, but it’s likely more attributable to the place the team hails from, and those who support the team, fictional characters or not. It doesn’t take a giant leap for the symbol to transcend the team it represents - the city, and its inhabitants, i.e. Yankees fans, are constantly on display to the entire world. Within America, media portrays life in New York City as a either a gold-standard of living or a struggle through hellish landscape of urban decay – both make for interesting stories. Whatever the angle, one of the USA’s chief cultural exports is media that’s about living in New York (Seinfeld, Sex in the City, Friends, Girls, Broad City). Because of this, the logo of the city’s local team gets considerably more mileage.
3. The Formal Phase (Symbol as Image):
For the Culture. No, Literally For the Culture.
What do people in New York City dress like? They probably wear Yankees gear. What kind of music do they make? Another chief cultural export of New York city, hip hop music, is key to adding a layer of meaning to our symbol of discussion. Throughout the late 1980s into the early 2000s, much of America’s most culturally significant (note that I didn’t say ‘popular’, that’s coming up) music was performed by people from New York City, often with a Yankees logo (or two) visible in music videos, live performances, or photo shoots.
From this point, the symbol becomes a shorthand for youth culture as whole, a shibboleth that to older generations was just a symbol for a baseball team, but to the more youthful encapsulated the energy harnessed by everyone from Run DMC to Nas to 50 Cent. Wearing it means some sort of connection to the culture of the place where the team is from.
4. The Mythical Phase (Symbol as Archetype)
For the…Vultures?
The symbol, in this next phase. becomes mythological.
Post-Fred Durst (yes, I’m ceiling the Ohio rap-rocker’s usage of the red Yankees hat as a key catalyst for this phenomenon) the symbol transcends itself once again into something that no longer has anything to do with baseball, or even New York.
Once the logo reaches this level of abstraction from its original meaning, one where its use is more about conveying the idea of being connected to a vague notion of coolness in general, all bets are off. Does it seem weird that Kendall Jenner, a living embodiment of Southern California culture, would wear a Yankees hat? Maybe, but when taking into consideration how many levels the logo has transcended from its initial meaning, it probably shouldn’t come as a shock. In this phase it’s transcended both baseball and New York.
5. The Anagogic Phase (Symbol as Monad:
Open to Interpretation
Once the symbol is freed from its original meaning, it becomes something that's more of a template, something that can be played with. Much like how the advent of photography freed painting from being representational and allowed for artists to dive into abstraction, the freeing of the Yankees logo from any actual meaning allows it to be played with in ways that wouldn’t make sense for more load bearing symbols.
Once it can be presumed that (most) people have knowledge of the symbols multiple layers i.e. “I know you’re probably not a Yankees fan even though you’re wearing the logo”, the symbol can then be modified well beyond its original design and still be recognizable as the primary layer of a modified symbol.
You wouldn't see someone this with the San Diego Padres logo. I mean, maybe you would, but it wouldn’t carry nearly the same weight. Infinite versions of the symbol are allowed to exist. A few favorites below:
Go Yankees