Legend Blue?
Posted by japanstats on 2009 January 1日 Thursday
Happy 2009!
So, it’s official, the Saitama Seibu Lions changing the team logo and colour are both official, new uniforms will be announced at a later date. The explanation for the new navy colour is that it’s a mixture of the Nishitetsu Lions black and the Seibu Lions sky blue. The new “Lions” font comes from the Nishitetsu throwback uniforms the team used in 2008, and that’s nifty, but the franchise could have paid respect to their Nishitetsu days without messing with the classic Tezuka Osamu Leo logo (were the royalty payments getting too high?) and the Lions sky blue that is associated with the franchise’s golden era in the 80’s (the Leo logo will remain on the club flag). And the navy just means that there’s yet another NPB team with navy as its team colour, after Chunichi, Yokohama, Orix, and Tokyo Yakult.
The new logo with the paw grabbing a baseball looks minor league as well. The team had obviously planned all this big change for the franchise’s 60th season in 2009, but it ended up being timed horribly because the Lions had just won it all, the Pacific League, Japan Series, and Asia Series and created goodwill with a reboosted and reconnected fanbase. Oh, and “legend blue” is a pretty lame name for the colour as well.
Japan, Hockey, Baseball, etc. 
Aaron said
It’s odd they’d change things up after winning the title, but I don’t hate the logo. What I dislike the most are the apostrophe-looking dots over the letter “I”. A little minor league, but I like the colors.
westbaystars said
I found it interesting that they wore the old Nishitetsu uniforms quite often last season. It was almost to the point that I started thinking that they were getting advertising revenue from the franchise’s former owner. And the Nishitetsu tie in continues with this move. Hmmm.
I still don’t understand what’s “minor league” about all of the uniform changes in Japan. It seems that when ever a team makes a change in their uniform design one of two camps start whining:
1. "It looks minor league."
2. "It's a MLB rip off."
I think it’s nice to see some originality for going forward and continuity with the past. It seems to me that this is what the Lions were striving for, and they were successful.
npbtracker said
I actually really liked the old Nishitetsu uniforms last year. I think they’ve aged well.
That said, I really liked the Lions’ previous logo. My favorite was this uniform and I was never nuts about the block print one they replaced it with.
Alex said
The Tezuka Osamu Leo logo was classic and iconic while this new logo looks like an alternate at best. Also, as you mentioned, yet another team has blue. It’s a shame they don’t bring back the green trimming they wore in the 80’s and 90’s, like Npbtracker pointed out.
simoncurrie said
This wasn’t just any logo though, the Tezuka Osamu Leo logo is a classic (that was also associated with winning) and it’s a damn shame that it’ll be used only on the team flag from now on.
Also, the Lions had a unique light blue, but will be just yet another team in navy. For paying respect to the Nishitetsu era, simply wearing the Nishitetsu throwbacks occasionally would have been enough.
Maybe there was a royalty issue regarding logo use, merchandising, etc.