Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

This week's selection from The Great eBay Haul features not only another defunct Connecticut minor league team but it also follows the theme of caps that are too dang small for my noggin. I still had to at least try on this size 7 1/8 New Haven Ravens cap for nostalgia sake as one of my first MILB caps as a youngster was a Ravens hat. It might have actually been the same size as this one! Before they ever played a game,  I probably bought (aka my mom bought) that Ravens cap  assuming they were a Marlins affiliate (rather than Rockies) because of the black and teal colorway. I  don't know if I've told you this before but my Bar Mitzvah colors were teal and purple because like most people in the early 1990's, I had an acute case of Tealism. This cap's crown has a New Era flag so the earliest it can be from is 1999 and because the Ravens made some minor adjustments to their cap logo in 2001, this one is either from 1999 or 2000. The satin taping and ...

For this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection from The Great eBay Haul, I decided to continue riffing on the reptile theme from last week's Wisconsin Timber Rattlers post with this Norwich Navigators cap from 1998. Get it? Navi-GATORS?!?! HAHAHAHA The Albany-Colonie Yankees of the Eastern League moved to Norwich, CT in 1995 and their rebrand as the Navigators lasted until the 2006 season when they became the Connecticut Defenders. In 2010, the team moved to Virginia and ever since have been known as the  Richmond Flying Squirrels which was a rebrand helmed by Brandiose. The logos and sweatband tags are spot on with other caps that are tagged here as 1998 but as we saw with last week's Timber Rattlers cap, the lack of a New Era flag is not always a dead giveaway that a cap is from before 1999. Just like with last week's cap, I've seen lots of 1999 baseball cards where players wore Navigators caps without the flag.  One last item of note th...

Answer honestly: are y'all getting sick of reading about these hats from The Great eBay Haul by now? I ask only as I've got many, many weeks worth of size 7 1/4 hats that I want to write about...and trade/sell off. Maybe I need to spice it up a little which is why I'm thinking of communicating this week's Wisconsin Timber Rattlers cap in Parseltongue! What's "Parseltongue" you ask? According to the Harry Potter Wikia page , Parseltongue is the "language of serpents...and those who can converse with them". This is a really good idea folks! Also, let's pretend the "W" behind the snake in this cap logo stands for "Wizard" rather than "Wisconsin"!  Oh you don't want to have fun? Fine, I'll just show you some interior crown photos of this vintage gem which I basically decided to feature today  because it has a maroon brim and black crown like last week's Williamsport Crosscutters cap . Aren't ...

For this week's edition of Fresh Fitted Friday, I figured I'd take a break from writing about caps from The Great eBay Haul that are too small for me to wear. Instead, I'm featuring a  Williamsport Crosscutters   snapback that I'm unlikely to wear simply because it's already falling apart and I haven't even worn it yet but to be fair, the sweatband is in good shape. The "crosscut saw" portion of this logo resembles fraying wool which plays well into the rugged lumberjack  design aspect. According to Paul Caputo's article,  Logging On: The Story Behind the Williamsport Crosscutters , the logo used until 2007 was hastily designed by a "local artist" when the team's affiliation switched from the Cubs to the Pirates in 1999. That artist was surely inspired by the other logos of hirsute bat wielders such as the Clinton LumberKings,   Butte Copper Kings and Stockton Ports . This Crosscutters logo also bears an uncanny resemblanc...

If this is your first visit to the blog, I welcome you! And if you're a regular reader, thanks for coming back despite my neglect of minor league caps for the past three consecutive weeks, which might be some kind of record; I'm not sure. Either way, I hope this week's vintage West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx cap makes up for the recent lack of MILB love! This is another cap that came from The Great eBay Haul that I've been writing about over the past few weeks. The Diamond Jaxx rebranding in 2002 was the first big client win for Brandiose , which back then was a just a fledgling design firm known as Plan B Branding. Plan B (now Brandiose) conceived "Jim Dandy" as the mascot for the Diamond Jaxx in 2002. According to Bloomberg Businessweek , "Dandy" is "a Disneyfied version of  a miner wielding a baseball bat modified into a pickax" While every MLB team began wearing New Era's polyester caps with black sweatbands and...