Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

The long wait for baseball's return is over! The 2025 MLB regular season has begun for every team except for the Colorado Rockies and Tampa Bay Rays, who face off today at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. I have written enough about the Rays lately, so I'd like to focus on my favorite team, the San Francisco Giants, who won their first game of the season today! Celebrating my team on the first post of each season should be a tradition I follow going forward because it sets the tone for things to come. Thankfully, I have no shortage of Giants hats to write about! And instead of flaunting one of their recent World Series on-field caps, I selected one with the iconic wordmark that debuted in 1983 which was actually a bleak point in Giants history. When I see this logo I envision it as a chest back or large patch on a very specific satin Starter jacket which I think a kid on my school bus had in 1987. Thinking back on it, he might have been the first Giants fan I ever met an...

Since last week's post the time zones in baseball have been out of whack considering Spring Training was in full in effect for all 30 teams but then the regular season began with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs facing off for a two-game series in Tokyo the following Tuesday. Before the series, both teams played and lost an exhibition matchup against the  Hanshin Tigers ( previously known as the Osaka Tigers) and both won exhibition games against the Yomiuri Giants who  were known as the the  Tokyo Kyojin when they began play as an independent team before becoming one of the four inaugural members of the Japanese Baseball League  in 1936. Sadly for me and all San Francisco Giants fans out there, the Dodgers won both games and will have an undefeated record for about a week! And  now that the teams are back in the States, they're about to switch back into Spring Training mode to play more exhibition games this coming weekend. All that back-and-forth...

Apologies for starting this week's post with a math lesson, but it's Pi Day so I must mention the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is referred to by the Greek letter “π” and has an irrational number value, which means it continues on into infinity. However, I am assigning it a rational number value of 3.1415926535 to save space here. Mathematics enthusiasts have celebrated that wacky number on March 14 (also written as 3/14) every year since 1988 as Pi Day which provides enough pretext for eating copious amounts of pie, whether they be sweet, savory or even both. The last time March 14 fell on a Friday was in 2014 and unfortunately I did not have the idea then to dedicate a post to it like I did this year! The only pie-related baseball caps I am aware of are the Lehigh Valley IronPigs "Shoofly" alternate or the Portland SeaDogs "Whoopie Pie" identity and I am not jazzed enough about either one to make a special purchase for this post so ...

It seems like just a year or two ago that I wrote about one of the all-time favorites in my collection which is the 1991 Nashville Sounds cap  although in reality that was just over ten years ago. Even more baffling is I've written about four other Sounds caps since then with today's Fresh Fitted Friday selection being the "Music City" variant from the 2015 rebrand. Three of those four caps were from that rebrand with this "Music City" alternate being what will likely be my final entry from that  epic set by Brandiose . I never imagined back in 2015 that a "Made in U.S.A." tag would someday become a thing of the past on New Era caps but I'm still holding onto the hope that the manufacturing of these timeless hats comes back stateside. The hit of red on the MILB batterman over a mostly black cap is fitting for a team from Nashville, which in my mind is a town synonymous with Johnny Cash, aka The Man in Black, who has an entire museum dedicate...