In 2015, some colleagues of mine at Toronto art institutions and I decided to try our luck at recreational softball, and we established the West-End W.A.S.T.E.
We wanted a team identity that reflected both our investments in literature, and the fact that we were likely going to be very, very bad at baseball. So we decided to base ourselves around the group who withdrew from the state in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, who await for the fabled return of a 16th century Italian dynasty to overthrow the American hegemony.
We became the West-End W.A.S.T.E., a dynastic ball team in the waiting—and we were really, tremendously bad for the first few seasons.
For the logo, we wanted to incorporate the symbol of the muted trumpet that recurs throughout the novel, and worked in the diamond around it—a classic baseball shape.
I worked with Ebbets Field Flannels from Seattle to establish the look of our uniform. Ebbets makes beautiful reproductions of mid-century baseball wear, and those first couple of seasons we were more interested in the pageantry of baseball, rather than any results on the field.
We drastically improved over our four seasons, and this past summer we won our rec league—sort of, it’s a long story flooded by a torrential rain storm—and decided to celebrate with a pennant that is currently being made at Oxford Pennant in Buffalo.
