The St. Louis Cardinals are ever-so-slightly changing the interlocking “STL” logo they use on their caps. It’s officially a change for 2020, but they’ve soft-launched it on various graphics packages.
You can see all the differences over at Chris Creamer’s Sportslogos.net. They’re incredibly subtle changes. Some flaring and rounding about the edges of the letters, but that’s basically it. Unless someone pointed the change out to you, I doubt you’d even notice it, even if someone was wearing a 2020 cap sitting across the table from you.
All of which makes me wonder why in the heck they bothered. One the one hand, the changes are so subtle that most people won’t even notice the difference and, more importantly, aren’t likely to feel it necessary to go out and get the new merch. At the same time, however, there is always a segment of hardcore fans who don’t like to have things messed with for no good reason. They’ll notice and it’ll kinda piss them off.
We saw this most recently with the Tigers “D” logo changing on the caps. It was a relatively small change but big enough to annoy people. Who does that even serve? What is the point? I’m sure someone has some numbers or some polling data to back them up on all of this, but it seems rather pointless to me. The STL logo wasn’t broken, so why bother with the “fix?”