Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

I guess since BirdFest is over, it's finally time to  look at a cap that is not an Orioles affiliate. There is  however a connection between last week's Aberdeen IronBirds post  and the 2000 Utica Blue Sox hat that is this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection.  We know Cal Ripken, Jr. owns the IronBirds but you might be surprised to learn the Utica Blue Sox was the team he bought and moved to Aberdeen. These sweatband tags are consistent with caps from 2000 and 2001 but this cap can't be older than 2001 since that was the team's last season in Utica.  The Carolina Blue MILB batterman here is top-not stuff. Utica doesn't host a minor league team anymore but they were lucky to have Miguel Cabrera play during the penultimate Blue Sox season in 2000. I hold Utica with the same reverence as other classic New York-Penn League locations such as Auburn, Batavia, Elmira, Vermont and Oneonta. While I've gotten my hands on a vintage c

Well folks, my baseball morale right now is the lowest it's been all season. The Los Angeles Dodgers, who continued their winning trajectory by sweeping the Arizona Diamondbacks in the ALDS earlier in the week, are now set to face the Chicago Cubs in the NLCS for the second year in a row and I'm not feeling optimistic about this match-up. I was actually hoping the Washington Nationals would be the team to beat the The Doyers in the NLCS (and because I have no caps from any Cubs minor league affiliates) I am featuring this vintage cap from the Harrisburg Senators, who have been the Nats' Double-A affiliate since the team relocated from Montreal in 2005. The Senators sported this logo from 1996 through 2005 and I'm not blind to the irony of the Senators  ditching the Yankee Doodle Dandy fellow in their logo  as soon as their parent team in Canada moved to the capital of the United States. This combination of satin taping and sweatband tags are co

Welcome back to your regularly scheduled missives of a baseball milquetoast! The last few weeks of summer have been hectic for me but I'm ready for fall even if at this very moment my beloved San Francisco Giants are two games away from being eliminated from a wild card berth. But you know who's in the running for one of those berths in the AL? The Minnesota Twins! I've written about some Twins farm teams on here but never the big club. I figure now is as good a time to do that as any since they're currently playing decent baseball which is something they haven't done since 2010. That's not a fact but the way; it's just an opinion I came up with by looking at their record over the last few years! Coupling that opinion with the 3 World Series the Giants have won since 2010 is comforting but  let's get back to this cap because it intrigues me. The tags and satin taping are consistent with what I've seen on caps from 2002-2004 however I ha

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 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

Firstly, many apologies for not posting last week. I should have been more forthcoming about that but as they say: "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen." Aw shucks, y'all know I don't really believe that!  At any rate, with only a few weeks away left in the regular season it's finally setting in for me that David Ortiz's career of playing baseball will be ending as well. As a Giants fan, I'm still salty that he smooth-talked Pablo Sandoval into leaving San Francisco for Boston but then again, Pablo has been a terrible on the Red Sox and the Giants have been fine without him.  I guess one positive of Pablo playing in Boston is that I have more opportunities to heckle him when he comes to New York although it's easier to razz a player if they actually, you know, play . While I've never actively rooted for Big Papi, I respect him immensely and would never boo him. Also, he's huge and he could crush me if I upset him. A while back I de

This week's  Fresh Fitted Friday  selection is the official on-field home cap of the Great Falls Voyagers of the Rocky Mountain region's Pioneer League.  This big red "V" over the poison-green planet reminds me of both of what happens when it's your first time seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a theatre as well as this insanely awesome TV miniseries from the 80's called... V   Made in U.S.A. tag is a must once again although I would like to see what kind of quality can be produced on the other planets of our solar system... How much I would give to have the MILB batterman be red and poison-green? From 2003 to 2007, this minor league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox went by the name of Great Falls White Sox but enlisted the help of a local advertising agency in Montana named Banik Communications to help them rebrand in time for the 2008 season.  Banik's efforts were a great success and a catchy slogan emerged around it: "