Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

This upcoming Thanksgiving will once again be spent with friends who live a thirty minutes drive away from Camden Yards so this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection keeps the City Connect theme going with the cap the Baltimore Orioles have worn since becoming the 19th team to launch a uniform for MLB's wildly successful engagement. In contrast to last week's Tampa Bay cap which I love because of its exuberance, here I appreciate the understated elegance of the "B" and the extra significance it holds being the first time the Orioles have worn a birdless cap since 1963 which was their only year doing so. Like last week's sweatband and undervisor, this one goes off on both aspects which I am thrilled about.  I especially love the aspirational message of "you can't clip these wings" here! Detractors of City Connect claim it is a cash grab but for smaller market teams like Baltimore which could use extra exposure and revenue, I fail to see how that is...

In my Milwaukee Brewers City Connect "Grill" cap  post from this past summer, I provided tiers of where each team's City Connect kits ranked in my opinion and while the hat was not the on-field design the Brewers wore for their City Connect games, that exclusive design from Hat Club was my preferred choice between the two. I mentioned then I had gotten some actual City Connect on-field caps and the Tampa Bay Rays cap has the honor of being the first to be posted here, although sadly my driving force in choosing it for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday post was the passing of my Uncle Bobby in Tampa. He was instrumental in getting me to appreciate baseball in my early years and you will never forget the person who taught you how to throw a fastball. I never got a chance to see a Rays game with him but I will be wearing this City Connect hat in tribute whenever I make my first trip to their new ballpark which is slated to open in 2026. I brought up both Juan Soto and the...

This Harrisburg Senators "Road Cap" was selected for this week's  Fresh Fitted Friday post  as tribute to Kamala Harris who served a term as a United States Senator from California from 2016 until assuming her current role of U.S. Vice President in 2021. Earlier this week, V.P. Harris lost her campaign for the office of U.S. President which makes the subject of this week's post the fourth in a row to have the "Didn't Work Out This Time" theme. Ahead of writing this week, I intended to claim that I do not make a habit of churning politically concentrated posts but looking back through the archives confirms this is the third time the attention shifted to  Presidential  matters. While this blog started in 2011, the election in 2012 was not covered as my only post that year was in April. AT any rate, this coming Monday is also Veterans Day so the patriotic focus feels today even more apt. Beyond the flag-loving aspect of this cap, I am enthralled by the comb...

Over the past few weeks, I have created something of a tradition by posting caps of teams that have fallen in the MLB postseason and this week's Albany-Colonie Yankees cap completes it. This one stings a bit more though because I was at  Yankee Stadium for Game 5 of the World Series this past Wednesday and had to suffer through watching the Dodgers clinch over the Yankees. As a fan of the Giants and Yankees that was a tough experience. Coincidentally, I spent this past weekend in Albany to see some live music and surprisingly received lots of anti-Yankee comments from folks over the first two nights the concerts took place because of the Hudson Valley Renegades " Hudson Line " cap I wore. I suppose those detractors could have been Dodgers fans or perhaps even Red Sox fans but in all likelihood, you could chalk it up to everyone hates the Yankees except for Yankees fans. I flew under the radar on the third and final night by wearing a Staten Island Pizza Rats cap howe...

I took a break from writing last week as I was simply too invested in the ALCS and NLCS to even formulate a coherent sentence and besides that I did not have an interesting hat to write about! But now that the Mets have been eliminated by the Dodgers, now is as good a time as any to showcase a fun hat to honor an otherwise outstanding year for The Kings of Queens. I mentioned Rosh Hashanah in my Eugene Emeralds post so those who celebrate can hopefully appreciate the of symbols of hope for  health, prosperity and general sweetness in the new year that apples represent.  Grey undervisor brings the retro vibes which a perfect match to the classically Amazin' royal blue and orange elements in the cap's design This is such a clean cap overall, I think I will be wearing this cap around town frequently.  After the Yankees punched their ticket to the World Series with their  ALCS  Game 5 win over Cleveland this past Saturday night, I became a ball of nervous energy as ...

At the time of writing, the New York Mets and New York Yankees have both come away as NLDS and  ALDS champions respectively and I could not be more excited about the increased possibility of my first Subway Series as a resident of New York! The rest of the country is more likely to drool at the prospect of a World Series in which the Yankees face off against the Los Angeles Dodgers and even with that, the San Francisco Giants fan in me would be thrilled to watch the Dodgers lose on baseball's biggest stage. And my third best outcome would be for the San Diego Padres to have a chance to avenge their 1998 World Series loss against the Yankees but I'm holding out hope for the Mets as of now! These  scenarios all assume the Yankees come out on top in their ALCS matchup against either the Detroit Tigers or Cleveland Guardians but neither of these teams appear to be the pennant winners for this season in my estimation. Well, hopefully I did not just jinx the whole thing but if I did...