THE HAT
To bring the Cleveland Municipals to life we worked with vintage sports apparel company Ebbets Field Flannels to develop a hat suitable for the Major Leagues. With the help of the folks at Ebbets, we ended up with a classic wool hat that faithfully reproduced the Cleveland Municipals logo we had designed. We used these hats as promotional items for the cause, selling them to get the word out and to increase the visibility of our proposal for the new name. The hats were of such high quality that Major League Baseball had an issue with how easily they could be mistaken for official MLB merchandise. They were a popular item.
Check out the reasoning behind our logo below and read more about our process for designing the Municipals here.
THE LOGO
Completed in 1931, Cleveland Municipal Stadium was home to the Cleveland Indians and Cleveland Browns until its demolition in 1997. It hosted four All-Star Games, two World Series, seven NFL Championships, and countless other sports and cultural events. The “C” in our logo is modeled after the stadium itself, celebrating the cradle of Cleveland sports history. The placement of a white Municipal “M” inside the “C” is inspired in both color and design by Cleveland’s most successful Negro League team, the Cleveland Buckeyes.
The Buckeyes wore the above “CB” logo on jackets celebrating their sweep of the Homestead Grays in the 1945 Negro League World Series, the first game of which was played at Municipal Stadium. The Municipals logo pays homage to Cleveland’s entire sports history, and recognizes the contributions of Cleveland’s Negro League baseball teams to that history.
