Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

The big news in baseball this week was Pete Rose's posthumous removal from Major League Baseball's permanent ineligibility list and while I was just a neophyte fan of the game in 1989 when this lifetime ban was instated on MLB's all-time hits leader, I remember how that ruling left a dark cloud over the game that would not soon be forgotten. Sadly thing things would only get worse a few years later when MLB players went on strike in late summer of 1994. This coincided with a time in my life when my "normal teenager interests" prevailed so my enthusiasm for baseball had waned considerably by the time the following year's strike-shortened season began on April 25, 1995. Time is perceived differently in your younger years. Pete Rose had become a distant memory while the four monster seasons Frank Thomas previously had were recent enough for me to half-heartedly welcome baseball back despite other factors beginning to take more precedent in my life. The Big Hurt w...

Instead of counting down the days until pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training facilities as we normally would around this time of year, the baseball world has been consumed by the repercussions of the Houston Astros sign stealing scandal  and I've been doing my best to abstain from painting broad strokes with my judgement brush. But as a San Francisco Giants fan it's hard to stay silent, especially when the team I loathe most is mentioned as the potential beneficiary of an L.A. City Council plot to request the recall the of the 2017 and 2018 World Series trophie s. At first it made my blood boil but the more I think about how it would play out, the more hilarious that outcome seems. The "Total Recall" outcome is something that I'm not going to actively back or root against but if it ends up happening, trolling the Dodgers would almost become too easy as Giants fans would have more material to work with than we ever had before. As I mentioned earli...

Ok, that's it. I don't have any more Southern League teams to write about (for now) and that's probably a good thing because I'm feeling some mild accomplishment that with this week's Chattanooga Lookouts cap, I have now written about eight of the ten teams in the league! From 1988 through 2008, the Cincinnati Reds had their Double-A affiliate in Chattanooga and after a ten year absence is back in Nooga as of the 2019 season. Once thing about Lookouts fans is they have to be good spellers as there are some real some doozies: Chattanooga, Cincinnati, Tennessee. Thank godnes for spelcheck. I haven't featured a Pro-Line cap here for a while so it's good to have one again for this week's post. Unfortunately, sweatband tags for this producer did not vary much throughout the 1990's so it's next to impossible for me to determine which year this cap is from. Ah, the parent team embroidered on the back of the cap. I remember thinking that wa...

This week's Fresh Fitted is another one from The Great eBay Haul but this one is different in that it's not too small for me to wear. It is, however, too  big  by a size or two but the fact I red hats aren't my jam means that I'll probably end up trading it for something I'd actually wear. If not, it would be nice to have a vintage cap like this one around for research. I've mentioned before how in addition to staying away from red caps, I have a general rule against wearing MLB caps in NYC, other than of course rocking a Yankees hat to Yankee Stadium. I think I avoid MLB caps because I don't want to mislead tourists from that team's city into thinking they can ask me for directions. I'm a bad person. Assigning a specific year to this cap might seem like a hard row to hoe but it really isn't. The sweatband tags could be from anywhere between 2001 to 2004 but I'm going to guess this cap is from either 2001 or 2002 based on ...