PCL gets new logo alongside restored name

The Pacific Coast League’s hallowed name is back, and with it comes an all-new look.

Along with the return of the historic league names across the Minors for 2022, the reborn PCL unveiled a new logo that pays tribute to its nearly 125-year history and the places it calls home. The team trusted with creating the mark was one of the league’s oldest members, the Tacoma Rainiers.

“I wanted to make sure we had the ability to create something together [with Major League Baseball] vs. being stuck with any semblance of the older logo because it clearly needed a refresh,” said Rainiers president Aaron Artman. “Our team started the process. We had two or three weeks to put it together, and then we handed it over to MLB, who did a fantastic job of simplifying the concept.”

The collaborative effort led to a clean look for the circuit’s next era. The PCL’s new emblem is a primarily navy blue roundel with the restored name of the league and the year of its first season, 1903. Inside is a five-color landscape representing the natural beauty of each region of the circuit’s domain.

“We went back and looked at all the old PCL marks, and there were some really cool ones back in the day,” Artman said. “I’d say they were really cool because they had a really cool font, very 1920s-looking. We saw some icons in there that we would’ve loved to play with because you could actually see them end up on a hat ... but that would’ve been a challenge to fit into the kind of coin look and color schemes that we’re going for with this new look. And it wouldn’t really have represented where the PCL is now, stretching as far east as Sugar Land and with all the different geography we have.”

At the foreground of the new mark is the water and shoreline that gave the league its name in the early years of the 20th century when it was nearly a de facto third Major League, featuring the best players in the western United States. (Tacoma is the only team located on the water in the modern iteration of the league.) Beyond the shore are four geological features. Pine trees on the left represent the Pacific Northwest and the evergreens that dot much of the West, a red rock formation in the middle symbolizes the league’s Southwest clubs and palm trees on the right are reminiscent of destinations like Las Vegas. In the background, two mountain peaks evoke the Rockies, Cascades, Sierra Nevadas and more regions that dominate the geography of many of the circuit’s teams.

“Where it landed was that we don’t need to do a cool old PCL font as the centerpiece with that stuff in the background,” Artman explained. “We can let the artwork carry it in the middle and have the copy be around the outside and have it all make sense.”

As one of the PCL’s oldest members, the Rainiers are stewards of its history, owning the rights to the league’s old marks. Toward the end of 2021, they were approached by Major League Baseball about the possibility of licensing the name to resurrect it. With just a few weeks to put a concept together after the holidays, Tacoma embarked on the creative process.

“The challenge we had internally was one, the time constraints in the midst of a bunch of other projects, and two, trying to signify the geographies of where the Pacific Coast League as a 10-team league is now,” Artman said. “It’s difficult to get in one logo, so we probably had too many things in there. MLB did a good job of getting to the core of them.”

After the Rainiers' creative staff got the process rolling, MLB took it across the finish line.

“It was a good symbol, for lack of a better term, of the ability to work in partnership as we start this relationship that’s only really a year old,” Artman said. “It’s good for everyone. I think fans will love getting back to the original name. Those of us owners and operators in the league will like getting back to the original name, and we know there could be variations of it or changes down the road, but it gets us back to a better, more familiar and traditional historical place, and I think that’s good.”

The return to the PCL’s name means more than just a new logo. It’s the return of 120 years of history.

“From a fan and historical perspective, the Pacific Coast League is wrought with history,” said Artman, whose Rainiers won the only championship in the league's lone season as the Triple-A West. “In Tacoma specifically, there’s clearly a tradition that fans who know baseball history or have been part of this franchise for a long time, it’s going to bring a lot of great feeling back to them.”