Rancho Cucamonga Quakes are the Picture of Stability

The Rancho Cucamonga Quakes have had the same team name and, conceptually, the same logo since their inception in 1993. In minor league baseball terms, this puts the team’s identity roughly on par with prehistoric cave paintings and Betty White—attractive, but really old. In a logo landscape that shifts and changes constantly—including five major brand changes this week alone*—it’s refreshing to see a team that has stood by its identity and been embraced by the community. (*See the Oklahoma City Dodgers, Daytona Tortugas, South Bend Cubs, Rome Braves, and Pawtucket Red Sox.)

Quakes logo, 1993-98.

Yasiel Puig was once a Quake. Photo by Garrett Nichols, RC Quakes.

“We don’t change our look or name and everything that goes along with it just for the sake of doing so,” said Voice of the Quakes Mike Lindskog. “If we were stuck with something that wasn’t synonymous with our community and wasn’t catchy and cool and neat, maybe we would be driven to try to upgrade.”

The Quakes, a Dodgers affiliate in the single-A California League, are among many sports teams named for horrific natural disasters that might affect a specific area—see the Colorado Avalanche, Miami Hurricanes, Iowa State Cyclones, and San Jose Earthquakes, to name a few. They play about 40 miles east of Los Angeles, not terribly far, geologically speaking, from San Andreas fault, which threatens to wreak devastating havoc on the area pretty much any day.

In fact, I attended a Quakes game August 23 of this year, just hours before the South Napa earthquake rattled the state. It raises the question of what the team’s response would be should an earthquake hit southern California.

“I imagine that would cause some conversation,” Lindskog said. “We want to be respectful in those situations…. I don’t think it would necessarily require an identity change if that were the case. Hopefully, we’ll never have to cross that bridge.”

If anything, the Quakes are doubling down on their identity. The cracked-font logo type appears on pretty much anything they produce—including their caps, which feature a stand-alone cracked Q logo (which I absolutely love). In 2014, fans at Quakes games saw the cracked type more than ever before, with a major branding initiative to feature the typeface not just on players’ uniforms (as with Chris Jacobs, above), but on all signage.

“There are like 350 signs in this ballpark,” Lindskog said, “and each and every one of them now is going to have a cracked font.”

The earthquake-based identity does not come in to play during promotions or in-game activities, Lindskog said. (When I asked about this, I’m not sure what I was thinking the response would be. I may have been secretly hoping for some promotional theme night where the field splits in half during the seventh-inning stretch and swallows the opposing team into the depths of the Earth.)

The game experience itself in Rancho Cucamonga is intensely family friendly. “This is a huge family environment.… We’re not real big envelope pushers as far as the racy stuff,” Lindskog said. “We know we live in southern California, but we try to keep it as classy as possible, too.”

Tremor with Matt Kemp. Photo by Garrett Nichols, RC Quakes, via the Quakes’ Facebook page.

Much of the in-game experience focuses on the team’s mascot, Tremor, who is not an underground, Kevin Bacon-eating monster, but rather a big, green dinosaur—a “Rallysaurus,” to be precise. Tremor not only dances and delights fans during the game, but he’s a regular at community parades, ribbon-cuttings, and, according to Lindskog, “everywhere you would expect a player in the community to be.”

“When you think Rancho Cucamonga,” Lindskog said, “I think there’s no greater ambassador than Tremor.”

The longevity of the team’s nickname reflects the attitude of the team towards its community. Just as the Quakes are a fixture in Rancho Cucamonga, the strength of their visual identity has been in consistency. While other teams rebrand and adopt increasingly wacky logos and nicknames, the Quakes have had two decades with essentially the same look—with that cracked font appearing everywhere from stadium bathroom signs to the players’ jerseys.

In a place where the ground might shift under your feet at any moment, the Quakes are the picture of stability.