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By Jarrod Prugar
For the Mirror
While everyone might love Altoona Curve baseball, not everyone loves Altoona pizza, the type of pizza served up Sicillian style with American cheese, sauce, green peppers and salami.
This week though, the Curve transform into the Altoona Pizzas, an ode to the pizza Altoona has become notorious for.
It's been a long time coming for the transformation as the process began last year as an idea and developed into a week that will feature much of what Altoona has to offer.
"It's quite a long process," Curve general manager Nate Bowen said. "We probably started last year in June or July, with a basic idea and then over the course of four or five months of redesigning and re-editing things through our whole creative team were able to come up with the design."
The jersey and logo creation was led by creative services assistant Reid Pohland, who took the logo from just a slice of pizza to transforming it into what fans will see on the field.
"We really wanted to make the pizza the focal point and show off the thickness of the bread with an angle so you can see thick Sicilian crust Altoona pizza is known for," Pohland said. "Then the sauce is going around the edges of the cheese, is also a main focal point."
With a logo with features much like the pizza, the devil was truly in the details.
"As we were making it, the one thing that was absent from it was the green pepper because on a slice, it's under the cheese, and there's really no easy way to portray that on a logo like that," Pohland said. "We added that to the eyebrows, as a little bit of a detail there and then given him a nice angry snarl. Then some smaller things in the logo. We have a piece of salami that he's holding instead of a baseball bat. Giving him that stance, it makes it look like he going to get knock you out with a stick of salami because he takes nothing from anyone."
The jersey itself has a lot of little pieces specific to Altoona that many in the community should recognize with a closer look.
"We went for white background with a brick that resembled the original Altoona Hotel along with a brick fire oven for pizza," Pohland said. "We extended that on the sleeves and the red for the red brick, and then some color banding on the sleeve for the different ingredients."
It also features salami numbers and will be auctioned off throughout the week.
"It's a uniform that really shows off a lot of the different aspects that make Altoona pizza unique, and it made for a very unique jersey as well," Pohland said.
As for the pizza itself, it remains to be determined whether it will be available at PNG Field this week, but there's plenty of other Altoona flair that will be on display.
"The pizza will be here in one form or another, but we've actually tried to take that entire week and not just make it about Altoona pizza, but do things that celebrate all of what Altoona is known for," Curve director of marketing, promotions and special events Mike Kessling said.