Hey, pennant guys

[thetahat]

Originally Posted by Domer05

Greg: Was that image of the Phillie runner sliding into home, with "Phillies" + horizontal bat beneath a graphic developed and used by the team; or was this developed by the pennant maker? I was always under the impression this was an official Phillies logo that the pennant maker was copying....

But, the fact that the same artwork was used for this Yankees pennant suggests otherwise, doesn't it?

Interesting question. As you likely know there was a time in the 1940s when the Phillies considered a name change, but did it in a weird way. Tried to gradually turn it over to Blue Jays. So for pennants, scorecards, even uniforms, the jay graphic began to appear. It never fully took so the plug was pulled in 1949. This is when “Fightin Phillies” took root. It seems the phrase had already been used as far back as ‘46 but my guess is that it took off when the blue jay was buried. The team used the script and bat part of the design as if it was an official logo, here are some scorecards that display it, one from 1949 and the other from 1951. (I don’t collect scorecards, these were images I found.)

I can’t say that I’ve ever seen the catcher/runner graphic anywhere else but on pennants. And there’s a good reason for that ... the team never really had a nice logo until the “fat P” was introduced in 1970. (My personal favorite were Phil and Phyllis from the bicentennial season.) They probably had nothing else to use! Eventually they moved to that dull graphic of a Phillies cap with stars orbiting it.

As for these scorecards ... recognize anything else?