Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Last week's Tucson Toros cap must have sparked something in me because I'm featuring a classic farm team that was once associated with the Houston Astros here  again this week . My intrigue with the Asheville Tourists began when I first became interested in minor league baseball in the early 1990's and the logo on the cap showcased today is from that time. If you've never seen this logo before, you'd never be able to guess it's an Asheville Tourists cap. I imagine most people will guess that it's a vintage Atlanta Braves hat, which in truth would not be a bad guess at all! The earliest example I can find of this typeface on a Tourists cap is from 1986 but the crown seems to be more of a royal blue. Also, I'm using this card from tradingcarddb.com mainly because the pitcher is showing bunt. This one is also from tradingcarddb.com and I'm showing it because it captures the 80's style racing stripes as well as the logo on a navy cro...

The big news in the baseball world this past week was Team USA defeating Puerto Rico en route to its first ever World Baseball Classic championship. If you checked out last week's blog, you'd know that I wrote about a Team USA cap and while I'd love to take credit for this feat because I wrote about it, I must doff said cap to the players on that team.  I wanted to continue to try my luck and give a helpful boost to the University of Arizona during the NCAA tournament.  I decided the best way to do this is by writing about a Tucson Toros cap, as Tucson is home to the University of Arizona (which is also where my wife went to college) but sadly the Wildcats were eliminated from the tournament tonight. Despite the disheartening finish, my wife and her alma mater has lots to be proud of and on top of that, the Grand Canyon State has one more full week of Spring Training ahead of it!  Even though I made an active decision to take a break from wearing red hats for the...

Ask yourself this question and answer honestly: is the World Baseball Classic exciting to you? I have a hard time with this one because while I want to be a fan of the tournament, the scheduling conflict with Spring Training is a bummer. The other downside is the US not sending its brightest stars to compete against the top talent from other countries. It seems the message sent is "Baseball: The Business" is more important to MLB than "Baseball: The National Pastime" but maybe that's not true. When the Olympic Committee decided in 2008 that baseball would no longer be an Olympic sport, the WBC was created with the hope that the sport would continue to grow worldwide, and it definitely has.  In 2016 it was announced that baseball would make its return in the 2020 Summer Olympics and I'm not sure what this means for the WBC. The fervor for the WBC might not be palpable in the US but the point was to expand the game beyond our borders meaning maybe we...

For those who  don't care about details pertaining to the materials New Era used in its caps over the years, I   admit that the posts from the past few weeks haven't been super exciting. But then again, would anyone who didn't at least have a passing interest ever purposefully come to this blog in the first place? What is exciting (for me at least) is I found a backup for the Denver Zephyrs hat that I wrote about in the early years of Baseball Milquetoast.  This is a hard one to find and I'm glad it didn't cost me an absurd amount of money.  The cap logo is a little frayed but consider this: when the Denver Zephyrs suited up for their last game in 1992, a good majority of my co-workers were not born yet. So let's just think about that for a moment. Not the crispest sweatband but what can you do? Like I said earlier, this cap couldn't have been worn by a Denver Zephyr after 1992 and these sweatband tags seem to be most consistent with caps from 199...

As you know, last week's Fresh Fitted was not part of my collection but I nevertheless gave it some airtime for the sake of sweatband tag research.  I'm mildly obsessed with time-stamping my caps and this week follows in that trend so I hope that's fine by you. I got into a bit of a rabbit hole looking at All-Star Game caps from years past last week so I've got a bunch to show and tell you about today.  F or those who are fans of these caps, this is your lucky day. For those who aren't, this is not your lucky day. Some of you younger folk out there might remember a ballplayer by the name of Mike Hampton. I always thought he was a swell guy but Hampton is the name of a town near where I'm from so I might be biased. A 1999 All-Star Game cap signed by Mike Hampton was featured here before and while he went 22-4 that year, his 2001 season was not as stellar even though he made the All-Star team.   The "New Era" and size tags are ones th...