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...

Looking back at the past few posts made me realize that all of these recent caps have featured either green, yellow or orange hues which are ones that some might consider garish. So continuing on in that tradition, this week's Fresh Fitted Friday  selection is the "Trident" variation of the Norfolk Tides logo which falls within that loud category that tend to gravitate towards. I took the seam ripper to work here and I'm pleased with the results. Also, I'm not sure exactly when the Tides wear the "Trident" logo but this and the road cap are easily my two favorites. No knock on the home hat but it is going into its eighth year and I wish the team would play around with the colorblocking by at least featuring black panels on the front. Standard issue sweatband tags here. All good. I like the "Gatorade" vibes on the batterman here enough to add a new label for it on the this post and am committed to tagging future and past posts with featuring b...

It has been almost two full months since my last post and while the holidays kept me occupied, things have been slow in regards to picking up new caps that I have been excited about. Luckily, I went home to visit my folks in Virginia and brought back some old hats to spice up the rotation such as this 1993 Baltimore Orioles cap in celebration of January 5 being National Bird Day. In 1993, the Orioles were in the midst of a renaissance with Cal Ripken inching closer to breaking Lou Gehrig's record of consecutive games played as well as Oriole Park at Camden Yards hosting that year's All-Star Game just one season after its opening.  Over the years writing this blog, I have made more than a few mentions of the New York Yankees being one of the last teams to switch over to caps with grey undervisors in 1994 but this week's Fresh Fitted Friday shows that the Orioles were also holding onto the green til the very end. I am not sure how much longer I will be able to resist popping ...

For the second week in a row I'm featuring a Favorites cap from my collection and before you start thinking "every cap is my favorite" I want to mention  the reason for posting this cap the Norfolk Tides wore from 1993-2015 today is because International Surfing Day is held annually on the third Saturday in June which happens to be tomorrow, June 17th. Until the team rebranded in 2016, the "wavy T" logo was the main cap logo worn by the Tides since 1993 which was their inaugural season at Harbor Park. The combination of a new uniform and ballpark undoubtedly ushered in a new  wave  of appreciation for the team. Luckily the "Made in China" tag is hiding underneath the sweatband here! The sky blue on the brim, button and batterman are a nice touch here but if we are being honest, they give off too much of a UNC vibe for my taste. Earlier I mentioned how the "new look" Tides of 1993 reinvigorated the team and I imagine after wearing this cap fo...

In the spirit of being transparent from the start, I am compelled to disclose I had to reach a bit for a hat to match today's holiday which is National Maryland Day . I must admit when it comes to Maryland, my cap coffers are rather bereft so I opted for one worn by the Richmond Virginians which was a team in the neighboring state of… you guessed right, Virginia! Researching the history of baseball in Maryland led me down a few potential caps for this post but I was most surprised with Richmond's past being very much intertwined with both of the minor league iterations of the Baltimore Orioles. The first concerted effort between the two cities occurred in 1915 when the International League Orioles temporarily moved from Baltimore to Richmond because despite fielding a club featuring a hometown talent by the name of Babe Ruth, were unable to compete with the popularity of the Baltimore Terrapins of a newly created  outlaw "third major league" called the  Federal ...

I'm glad to be getting back into a regular groove of posting and hopefully you are enjoying the posts, too! I also hope that you won't mind that this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is actually a snapback! Truth be told, you can't even be mad at this one because the material on the crown is Fresh Mesh plus it's yet another Rochester Red Wings cap! The details surrounding the years this cap might have been worn are fuzzy —as is the embroidery on the top right portion of the cap logo—seeing as how I can't seem to find an exact match for the logo via my usual resources.  The solo sweatband tag on here tells me that this cap definitely has some age on it and it actually reminds me of my 1992 Tidewater Tides cap that once belonged to Kevin Baez. Speaking of Kevin Baez... Baez played the 1994 season in Rochester. He's seen here wearing the cap logo used from 1992 through that season however I believe the red brim was only wor...

I didn’t end up going to a game during the Orioles-Mets series earlier this week but regardless of that, the hat that I would have worn to the ballpark is one that pays tribute to both teams. The road cap that the Norfolk Tides have been wearing since 2016 is another gem designed by Brandiose. When I wrote about the current Tides home cap previously, I brought up how the locals were not impressed when the main logo was revealed. Now that I have the road version, I think this one should have been introduced as the home cap as its nautical design is better suited to the conservative population of Norfolk, VA. Having grown up in Norfolk, I can tell you that history plays a huge role in the city’s identity. In fact, I still hear folks griping about missing the Mets, who were the Tides’ parent team from 1969 until they became affiliated with the O’s in 2007. Even though Norfolk isn’t yet on board with the cartoonish logos that are de rigueur, their commitment to the ...

Well, BirdFest sure  flew  by quickly didn't it? Are you proud of me for finally coming up with a name for the Orioles/Maryland-theme I've been running for the past month? And how about that sweet pun to lede this week's post! Nice, right? At any rate, this week's  Fresh Fitted Friday selection  is an Aberdeen IronBirds cap I got in 2013. I've been wanting to write about this one for a long time and now I finally have a reason as it's a Maryland-based team right down to the core. This is the current IronBirds logo. It was designed ahead of the 2013 season by Studio Simon which is a design firm based in Louisville, KY. Sweatband tags are more fun to look at on older caps but this one's cool because you see the "Made in U.S.A." peeking out below the center tag which is sadly far too uncommon these days. You also don't come across too many MILB batterman logos that are silver or grey so this is another neat thing about thi...

As a reader of this blog you'll know that in anticipation of spending Thanksgiving in Baltimore, I've spent the last few weeks writing about Orioles-themed hats and I'm happy to say that the peak of Maryland-fest is this 1963 Orioles cap. Unless you are a hardcore O's fan, you'd never know that the Orioles ever wore a hat without a bird on it but they did wear this particular logo for just one season in 1963.  It's a known fact that any given year's baseball card set usually uses photos taken the previous season so after hunting down cards from the 1964 set to find images of this cap, I found that most of the cards featured players wearing caps with the "Lead-off Bird" instead of the "Orange B" logo.  The "Orange B" logo must not have been as much of a fan favorite as "Lead-off Bird" so I'm guessing the Orioles ended up reverting back to the older logo for most of the 1963 season b...