In late 2003, residents of Clearwater, Florida, were startled to see this billboard appear in their hometown without explanation:
And this one:
The cryptic message caused some concern.
“People started freaking out,” said Jason Klein, co-founder of the baseball-centric design firm Brandiose. “They called Viacom, and they wanted Viacom to disclose who the client was.”
Viacom had been sworn to secrecy, but when community leaders joined the freakout, they relented—the billboards were teasers for the new-look Clearwater Threshers, hitherto the Clearwater Phillies of the Single-A Florida State League.
“About four days go by and my phone starts ringing. I get a call from the county commission, I get a call from the city manager of Clearwater, and from the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce wanting to know what the hell are we doing,” said John Timberlake, the team’s general manager. “They got so much heat locally from politicians that they eventually gave in and had to tell them who was doing it.”
By the time the team placed an ad in the St. Petersburg Times (now called the Tampa Bay Times) designed to look like a news story about a fisherman who pulled a thresher shark out of the Gulf of Mexico and a baseball rolled out of its mouth, the gig was pretty much up.
All of this was in anticipation of the Phillies’ High-A farm team ditching the name of its parent club for something more appropriate to the local community. The team had considered options like Barracudas, Beach Dogs, and Sand Sharks, all of which came up in a name-the-team contest.
“We definitely wanted something that branded us as Clearwater as a beach community,” Timberlake said. “We kept coming back to the shark theme—sand sharks, variations of that, and toying around with the different types of sharks.”
They enlisted the Brandiose guys Jason Klein and Casey White, who visited Clearwater and delved deep into the local community. “We literally went down to the docks in Clearwater and started asking people, ‘Tell us about what are you pulling out of the gulf, tell us some stories,'” Klein said.
While the most common shark in the local waters was the sand shark, it felt too passive, a little too common, and maybe a little too obvious as a choice for the local team name. During their visit to Clearwater, one local fisherman’s anecdote captured Jason and Casey’s imagination.
“We latched on to one story a guy told us about the shark with the longest tail in the shark family, which is a thresher,” Klein said. “It beats its tail against its prey, stuns them, then goes in for the kill.”
The more the team and their designers learned about thresher sharks, the more they liked the idea. They liked the aggressive image of the shark disabling then circling its prey (like a baseball player circling the bases) before moving in to devour it, as well as the fact that as a deep-sea shark that hunts alone, threshers carried an air of mystery.
“It wasn’t as common,” Timberlake said. “It wasn’t a hammerhead, something that every single person would have heard of.”
And not only that, but it just had a good ring to it. “The name Thresher sounds like flash, it sounds like thrash,” Klein said. “The sound of it was aggressive and good for a sports team.”
The logo itself features the distinctive form of the thresher shark set in colors that Klein describes as a beachy take on the Phillies brand. The team debuted the new look the same year they moved into their new ballpark, Brighthouse Field, which is also home to their parent club’s spring training. The new ballpark featured prominently in the team’s branding in a unique way.
“The colors, we actually stole from the ballpark construction blueprints,” Klein said. “We saw in the plans for constructions, the stands were going to be this smokey blue and navy and there was a little bit of Phillies red in there, and so we designed it right off the ballpark colors.”
Klein describes a conversation between Timberlake and the Phillies president at the time. “When the Phillies came down that first year for spring training, David Montgomery said, ‘John, why the hell would you paint the entire ballpark Threshers colors?’ He said, ‘No no no, they made the logo off the ballpark colors.’”
Another reason for the team color is pure pragmatism. As a Phillies affiliate (they’ve been owned by their big league club since their inception in 1985), there are financial reasons to have a certain palette.
“Quite honestly, if you’re going to have a team full of players that are going to have red shoes, you’re either going to buy them spikes and turf shoes and all of those things as part of your expense, or you’re going to have your colors match up with their red shoes,” Timberlake said. “It’s kind of crazy, but it’s something that played into the thought process.”
The Threshers have two cap logos, both of which feature a shark forming the letter C, which serve two different purposes. They wear the shark chasing a ball when they are in the field, and the shark with the bat when they’re at bat.
And in the wordmark, “they use a metallic peach glitter twill so that it looks like a Florida sunset on the jersey lettering,” Klein said. (That’s Phillies Hall of Famer and first Threshers manager Mike Schmidt wearing that metallic peach glitter above.)
It would be impossible to discuss all of the particulars of the Threshers logos because, to put it lightly, there are a certain number of them. “Clearwater has been our biggest and most loyal client that we’ve worked with in our history,” Klein said. “They have more logos than anybody we’ve ever worked with.”
Some of those many logos are pictured above, courtesy of Brandiose. Collectively, these logos tell a larger story, which Klein describes:
“One of the big stories behind this brand that Casey came up with was this idea that maybe the shark is a little mysterious, and let’s not show all of our cards all of the time. So his idea was this relationship between adults, kids, and a shark that was similar to Captain Hook and the crocodile…. There would be times when you saw the effects of the shark—like the life preserver with the bite taken out of it—and that the adults were the ones who are actually scared of sharks. But kids aren’t scared of sharks, so the kids club logo has this kid, looks sort of like Dennis the Menace riding the shark. He’s got a fishing pole with a baseball dropped in front of the shark’s mouth, sort of carroting the shark along.”
While Timberlake says that the Threshers were admittedly late to the game in rebranding by the time they did so in 2003, the ultimate effect of adopting a name and logo with local appeal has been a boon.
“The first year that we had our logo, we sold almost a million dollars worth of merchandise,” he said, “and that was compared with maybe selling $80 to $100,000 in merchandise in previous years.”
And it’s not just been a financial boon, but a boon in terms of building a unique brand. “People will ask, ‘Who are you guys affiliated with?’” he said. “That is not a negative for me. That is really a positive of we have our own identity.”