The Minor League Baseball franchise established in 1963 is currently a Single-A baseball club and has the status of a farm team of the Cleveland Indians. Throughout its quite a long history the club has changed its name almost a dozen times, and has had affiliations with more than nine Major League Baseball teams, including such famous ones as Texas Rangers, Boston Red Sox, and New York Mets.
The Minor League Baseball team we know today as the Lynchburg Hillcats, traces its roots back to the end of the 19th century, when in 1894 the club named the Lynchburg Climbers was established in Virginia. Since that time the team has been playing in the Virginia League under several different names — Shoemakers, Grays, and Senators. In 1943 the Lynchburg Senators moved from the Virginia League to Piedmont League and got their first affiliates, the St. Louis Cardinals. This is how the Senators became the Cardinals.
This collaboration finished in 1955, followed by an eight-year break in the club’s career. In 1963, when the team came back to the field and got the new MLB affiliate — Chicago White Sox, the Cardinals were renamed to the Lynchburg White Sox. After this partnership, there were several more, when the minor team changed its name according to the names of the mother clubs — Twins, Rangers, Mets, and, finally, Red Sox in 1988. However, in 1995 the baseball club from Lynchburg decided to stick to their own identity, and this is how the Hillcats team was born.
The visual identity history of the Hillcats is not as colorful as their professional career. After the club got its current name in 1995, it started being more stable and constant. The Lynchburg Hillcats have had only one notable logo redesign since the 1990s, which took place in 2016.
In the spring of 2016, the team announced it was going to find a new name. However, most of their fans disapproved the move, so eventually, the franchise just introduced a set of new logos and a totally new color scheme. The cat on the updated Lynchburg Hillcats logo looks wild and menacing.
The palette includes Seven Hills green and two shades of blue, Blue Ridge blue, and Midnight blue.