Unless you regularly watch the YES network or listen to either WCBS or WFAN, you might not know that the 27x world champs in fact have a team slogan from year to year. What’s that? The Yankees actually go through the trouble of writing up some marketing tagline the same way lesser teams like the Twins do in order to sell tickets? Yes, they do.
And the slogan for 2012 is one of the worst so far. Get ready to hear the dulcet tones of John Sterling belting out “the 2012 New York Yankees, heroes remembered, legends born!”
Here are a few of the Yankees worst recent slogans:
2012: Heroes remembered, legends born
Yuck. Let’s use some degree of discretion when throwing around terms like heroes. Mark Teixeira is a fine fellow, but at the end of the day, he gets paid millions of dollars to get to first base 37% of the time.
2008: The final season
Fine reference to the closing of old Yankee Stadium, but this one doesn’t exactly inspire hope. Sans hope, the team failed to make the playoffs.
2007: Where players become legends
Also not terrible. Unfortunately the most legendary thing about this season was the midges afflicting Joba Chamberlain in the division series.
2006: Pride, Power, Pinstripes
Possibly the most cringe-worthy of all time. Anytime you have to advertise pride, you have a problem. See, for example, a certain NL central team that uses the slogan “Pride, Passion, Pittsburgh Pirates.” Don’t want to be associated with that, for sure.
2005: Looking back, looking forward
Maybe it’s not the slogan itself that was so bad, but rather the ersatz enthusiasm with which Michael Kay read it at the end of promos.
2004: World Class
This one makes reference to the Yankees appearance in the 2003 World Series. One problem here: they didn’t exactly win that World Series. Why point this out? Yeah, we’re a world class organization, just slightly less world class than the Florida Marlins.