Most baseball fans in North America know the Liga de Béisbol Profesional Roberto Clemente (LBPRC) colloquially as the Puerto Rican Winter League. The league was founded in 1937 as the Liga de Béisbol Profesional de Puerto Rico, then in 2007, after a one-year hiatus and a restructuring, it changed its name to the Puerto Rico Baseball League. In 2012, the league adopted its current name, an homage to Puerto Rico’s iconic baseball Hall of Famer, Roberto Clemente.
The LBPRC made a splash on social media this week with an eye-catching new logo created by Brandiose. According to Brandiose partner Jason Klein, the firm was in Puerto Rico working on a rebrand for one of the league’s teams (stay tuned for that!) when they turned their attention from the logo on the front of the cap to the logo on the back of the cap. The league’s then-current logo (below) didn’t quite work for that application, so Brandiose considered options.
“I thought, it would be really cool if we could create something that felt like the Major League or Minor League logo,” Klein said. “The league in Puerto Rico feeds so many players into Major League Baseball, and has over the course of the years, how can we make it an extension of the Major League or Minor League logos?”
Brandiose approached the league with the idea to create a logo that uses similar dimensions to those familiar MLB and MiLB league logos, while incorporating the Puerto Rican flag and a recognizable silhouette of Clemente.
“The league is all about celebrating Roberto Clemente, and I was like, we’re going to have to figure out how to get a player’s silhouette,” Klein said. “So how do we get Roberto Clemente inside the Puerto Rican flag?”
The result is a new league logo that from a distance looks like the Puerto Rican flag, but upon closer inspection, very clearly includes the distinctive silhouette of Roberto Clemente, with one of the flag’s three red stripes replaced by a baseball bat.
“I thought it would be really cool if you saw this on the back of a Puerto Rican team’s hat from 10, 15 feet away, you would say, oh that’s the Puerto Rican flag, and then, as you get closer, you would realize it’s Roberto Clemente,” Klein said. “As much as we are looking at it big, and we see Roberto Clemente, we knew that 90 percent of the application was going to be on uniforms, and particularly at about an inch wide…. When 90 percent of the application will be on the back of a baseball hat, most people in the world will say it’s a Puerto Rican flag, and then when they get closer, they’ll go, oh no that’s a player.”
The new logo will make its debut when the LBPRC begins in mid-November.