Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

The great thing about being a cap collector is that laying eyes on fresh new logos is as exciting as the classics that got you into the hobby which will always resonate with you. That's why after all these years, the logo the  Cedar Rapids Kernels wore on their caps from 1993 - 2006 is as exciting to me now as always. The Cedar Rapids Reds became the Kernels when the Minnesota Twins became their parent club in 1993 and even though the logo doesn't have the cartoonistic Poochie Effect  that other teams began to employ in the mid-1990s, this cornball has a lot going for it. I've written DeLong caps in previous posts however only the ones I've identified as being from 1993 and beyond have featured the loose MILB tag so finding out the exact year it first appeared might need to be my next project. DeLong's calling card is the square brim which provides a slightly different result once these caps are broken in.  I put the "Favorites" label on this post as well ...

Wella-wella-wella welcome back, y'all! Last week was way too busy for me to turn in a quality post but we are keeping the spirit of the Midwest League theme going this week with a classic cap from another Iowa-based franchise: the Cedar Rapids Kernels. I've written about the current version of the Kernels cap but in truth, that one has never been my favorite. Virtually every sports team has a logo that I feel is their greatest and to me, this week's cap is the classiest and most elegant logo the Kernels have ever worn. Firstly, a baseball gently emerging from a corn husk is about as Midwest as it gets, folks. Corn's importance in the region is boundless but what I appreciate most about the imagery is it represents new life as every spring, a new season of baseball begins in Cedar Rapids. I've never been to Iowa but teams like the Kernels, Clinton LumberKings and Quad Cities River Bandits have piqued my interest since an early age. The movie F...

It's said the longest day of the year is sometime between June 20-22 but for baseball fans, the longest week of the year is the week of the All-Star break. The mid-summer respite never comes as a surprise but four consecutive days without games disrupts my daily ritual of checking box scores and setting my fantasy roster. T hankfully, play recommences today. Since the All-Star Game didn't inspire me to write about a particular hat or team for this week's Fresh Fitted , I selected an unworn cap from the vault. Perhaps t he biggest reason for busting  out this Cedar Rapids Kernels cap is that one of my favorite non-baseball summertime activities is eating copious amounts of corn on the cob and I love that the logo combines both elements so well. If you can't tell what's going on here, let me fill you in. Inside that corn stalk is a smiling corn cob/baseball bat hybrid thing wearing a hat and he looks like he's taking a nap. Everything about him is perfect...