For baseball in Lexington, Kentucky, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Under new ownership, the franchise announced today that they are rebranding as the Lexington Legends, reprising a name that the team had abandoned just a year ago.
The franchise has been through some changes in recent years. After moving to Lexington in 2001, the Lexington Legends played in the then-Class A South Atlantic League through the 2019 season. The Legends lost their affiliated status in the 2020 reorganization of affiliated Minor League Baseball. After missing the 2020 season due to COVID, the Legends joined the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, an MLB partner league. The team changed its name to the Lexington Counter Clocks after the 2022 season, playing with that moniker in 2023.
Just moments ago, the franchise’s new ownership group, Temerity Baseball, announced that the franchise will be known once again as the Lexington Legends. With that announcement the team unveiled a new brand that has strong visual connections to previous iterations of Legends baseball, highlighted by a legendary new character, Mighty Lex. Previous versions of Legends’ identities featured a beefy, burly character. This new guy has a slightly different air about him.
“We loved kind of the swagger of the old identity,” said Alicia Amling, director of Temerity Baseball. “But we really wanted something a little more accessible, a little less masculine and gendered in this big Paul Bunyan way. And we wanted something that a little kid would run up to, that I would put on my hat and be like, who is that cute little guy?”
Per Dan Simon of Studio Simon, the Louisville-based firm that created the new brand, the character is meant to evoke a legendary baseball figure, with one important distinction.
“I wanted to lean heavily into Mighty Casey,” Simon said, referencing the eponymous slugger featured in Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s 1888 poem Casey at the Bat. “The narrative here is, this is Mighty Lex, and Mighty Lex did not strike out. Mighty Lex delivered, and the legend was born.”
The old-timey character evokes a bygone era, wearing a pillbox cap, collared jersey, and—notably—a handlebar mustache. That mustache was an important part of the brand prior to 2023, and there was no doubt these new Legends were bringing it back.
“It was both appropriate for the time period or stereotypical of the time period and it was a big part of the brand previously, so we had to have that,” Simon said.
And while Mighty Lex’s round figure might not inspire the same fear his burly predecessors did, Amling suggests he’s not to be taken lightly.
“With his wink and his mustache, I think he’s just a debonair guy with swagger who might be packing a lip of chewing tobacco or he might have bourbon in his water bottle,” she said. “He certainly has some swagger.”
The decision to reprise the Legends nickname came from the community itself. After meeting with stakeholders and focus groups, the ideas of remaining the Counter Clocks or finding a new name were never strongly considered—in part because the Legends nickname was popular and in part for more pragmatic reasons.
“The Legends, they’re legendary. It was a beloved brand in minor league baseball,” Amling said. “And, total transparency, we closed on the team in January and you can’t come up with a good new name and a brand in three months. So when we had this perfect gem of a name sitting there, it was a no-brainer.”
While the updated brand has new elements—most notably Mighty Lex and a custom script—there were parts of the previous Legends brand, which was created by Brandiose in 2013, that fans of the team will recognize. The green and blue color palette ties the new brand to the past, and certain marks, like an L that incorporates the state of Kentucky into its letterform, have been carried forward and updated.
“Even though we’ve got a new character and we’ve got new lettering, there’s a lot we wanted to bring back, that we intentionally brought back as homages to the history of this ball club in Lexington,” Simon said. “It’s the next in the line of what was a popular brand that represented this club very well.”
The new suite of logos features a mark that doubles down on the team’s name, with text that reads “It Will Be Legendary.”
The new-look Legends will take to the field when the Atlantic League’s season begins April 25.
