Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

I have celebrated my fair share of wacky holidays on this blog recently but with St. Patrick's Day coming up this weekend, I am once again going rogue by celebrating a different holiday in its place. Well,  I suppose St. Urho's Day is not entirely different as it is also a playfully fabricated celebration of a saint who chased away a threat menacing his people. While the hero of St. Patrick's Day weilded a staff to rid Ireland of its snakes, St. Urho, according to Friends of Finland Community , saved Finnish grape grops from the grasshoppers that almost ruined the harvest with a trident. So of course a cap with a green visor and a snarling ocelot holding a clava (spanish for "club") is the natural choice for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday post.  Greensboro selected "ocelotes" for their Copa de la  Diversión  identity as a nod to the three ocelots currently residing in the South American habitat at the North Carolina Zoo in nearby Asheboro, NC.  ...

January 19 is National Popcorn Day so of course I am currently regretting not picking up one of the sweet Cracker Jack inspired caps from the "Ballpark Snacks" collection released by Hat Club x Yote City in 2022. Because I am hesitant to pay resell prices for newer caps, I had to quickly find an alternate solution for a popcorn-related cap for this week's  Fresh Fitted Friday post. Whilst researching my options I learned there are two different kinds of corn used to make popcorn:  butterfly and  mushroom. The former is what you are enjoying after it is loaded with butter and salt at the movie theatre whereas   the latter — which  coincidentally enough, also resembles a  baseball— is the kind that is coated in caramel to make  Cracker Jack. Because a brown hat that also features red, white and blue was sadly not at my disposal, a pivot toward the butterfly varietal of popcorn brings us to the Monarcas de Eugene cap which the Eugene Emeralds debut...

We are two weeks into Hispanic Heritage Month and calling back to last year's Los Murciélagos de Louisville  post is this week's Abejas de Salt Lake cap, which is another stunning logo created for the Copa de la Diversión campaign which itself is an expansion of the Es Divertido Ser Un Fan ("It's Fun to Be a Fan") fan engagement program that began in 2017. This logo is one of the more understated Copa designs but the clean lines and bright colors—featuring just the right amount of Tealism , by the way—caught my eye instantly and I especially  appreciate how they implement the bee stripes into the "A" here.   The grey undervisor is a special treat due to this cap being a Hat Club exclusive that I purchased in March 2020. Obviously the entire MILB season was canceled that year but even it had not, the team would not have worn this cap as this was a fan only release.  I love how relaxed the Miami Nights/San Antonio Spurs vibe is on this batterman. All of a ...

This week's Fresh Fitted Friday finds me once again barely able to contain my composure as my San Francisco Giants have lost their two-horse race with the New York Yankees in the Aaron Judge Sweepstakes. Since last week's post, Jacob DeGrom departed from the New York Mets to join the Texas Rangers while Justin Verlander signed with the Mets to help fill that void. This now leaves Carlos  Rodón as the lone pitching ace without a place to call home in 2023 and at this point, I'm rather disinterested in where he ends up as long as it's not the Los Angeles Dodgers. Luckily, this recent article from MLB Trade Rumors  linking  Rodón with the Texas Rangers has me feeling confident that my rivals in LA are not likely to sign him to a deal.  My voodoo powers were ineffective last week but that didn't stop me from selecting the cap worn by the Rangers' High-A affiliates in Hickory, NC for this week's post! Ever since 2019, the Hickory Crawdads have been known as the...

This week's Los Murciélagos de Louisville cap is a nod to Mexican Independence Day which commemorates the  " The Cry of Dolores" that was as a  call to arms by Roman-Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in  the early morning on  this day in 1810 thus sparking the   Mexican War of Independence that would not end until  Spain withdrew its forces on August 24, 1821. Mexico's victory was followed by the  signing of the Act of Independence of Central America in Guatemala City on September 15, 1821. This proclamation effectively created  the Federal Republic of Central America which was comprised of Mexico's neighbors directly to the south: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. By 1841 however, the newly created union had dissolved when each of those former Spanish territories created their own independent republics, all of which still consider "September 15" as their Day of Independence to this day. Because of the historical...

This week's Fresh Fitted Friday takes the posting duties on location to Mexico for the first time ever. To commemorate my very first trip South of the Border, this week's hat is the 2018 "Música de Memphis" hat the Memphis Redbirds wore as part in the inaugural campaign of the Copa de la Diversion in 2018. Memphis only wore this cap for the first two seasons of the Copa campaign but I hope they bring it back in future years because it is such a fun color combination Looking closely at the tag under the sweatband shows that this cap was Made in U.S.A. and besides being a great thing in and of itself, it suggests it was worn during the first Copa season in 2018 because that was the last year New Era produced caps at its plant in Derby, NY I love the festive colors on the MILB batterman ( batterhombre ? bateadorehombre ??) patch here If you're a regular reader of the blog with a decently average memory you know that I was a resident of California during the years i...

Fans of the regularly scheduled calendar-themed posts are getting a double dose this week as today is National Squirrel Day and National Hugging Day. It’s fortuitous that these holidays fall on a   Friday because a holiday to celebrate squirrels is the perfect moment for my Las Ardillas Voladoras de Richmond cap for this week’s Fresh Fitted Friday selection. If you’re still wondering where the hugging part comes in, ask yourself if there’s a creature out there that hugs trees more than the bushy-tailed rodents which comprise the squirrel family!   Richmond already has a zany logo so whoever had to make that amp-up squirrel even more wild for the Richmond Squirrels to wear as part of the “Copa de la Diversion” had quite the task ahead of them.   Luckily there was an in-house plan in place with Flying Squirrels’ Creative Services & Production Manager Nick Elder converting Nutzy into a masked luchador of lucha libre – a term which literally means “Freesty...

MLB's National League Division Series starts tonight and while last year around this time I was hate-watching the Dodgers and hoping they would lose simply for schadenfreude purposes, tonight I'm hoping the Dodgers lose because it would give the Giants a perfect win record against them in the playoffs as this series marks their first ever postseason meeting! I was admittedly very stressed out last week because the Giants had yet to clinch the division yet somehow right now I'm even more unnerved because of the gravitas of this impending series against the Dodgers so I decided the best distraction would be to write about a Copa de la Diversion cap and have tasked this 2019 Lakewood Medusas hat for the job. Medusas  is the Spanish word for jellyfish which makes sense considering Medusozoa is the latin-based term used to refer to any of these closely related species of aquatic animals. And you really have to give Brandiose credit for making this gelatinous menace look even ...

I struggle whenever someone asks me what cap logo is my "favorite" and yet one would think that being unprepared for the same question enough times would prompt me to correct that but alas, I have not. I suppose I have more fun rattling off the first five caps that come to mind as opposed to working with a scripted answer.  If you ask me point blank right now about my "top 5" of current caps, it would include the Asheville Tourists, Vermont Lake Monsters, Norfolk Tides, Hillsboro Hops and Carolina Mudcats. There are plenty of defunct teams out there with caps that make me shed a tear of nostalgia but I figure if someone's asking about caps they want to hear about ones they could easily buy.  Besides the Hops which is a newer team, the rest of those clubs have rebranded a few times but of those remaining four, the only one that's consistently had the same logo for their entire existence is the Mudcats. So when it was time to create an identity for the Copa de...

Things are heating up around the country and for folks in the midwest, (I think) that means one thing: it's time for some corn, folks! Today is National Corn on the Cob Day and I really have no choice but to show love to the corn on this week's post. My all-time favorite corn-tinged team is the Cedar Rapids Kernels and I've written about two of their most famous logos (both times in the summer months no less) but this time I've got a special treat for y'all as this week's cap is the "Elotes" logo that the Clinton LumberKings have donned since 2019 as part of the Copa de la Diversion campaign. If you look really closely, there's an "E" that's meant to represent the sour cream and cojita cheese components of an elote. Sadly, the writing gets kinda lost in the chili powder and green stuff which I believe represents the lime. I really like the hot pink joining up with the maize on the batterman here and the eyelets really make this cap p...

I'm not sure how this blog has been around for ten years without having done at least one Mother's Day post but that all changes today with this Asheville Yacumamas hat! A  yacumama  is a giant snake-like creature that is believed to inhabit the Amazon Rainforest in Peru and means  "Mother of Water"  i n Quechua,  the indigenous  language spoken in the region. The words  yaku  "water" and mama  "mother" come together to describe what according to the  legend, is responsible for the the creation of all water-based life forms. If you're wondering how a yacumama was chosen as Asheville's identity for the Copa de la Diversion campaign then let me regale you with the Cherokee tale of a giant "leech the size of a house" that resided in the Hiwassee River in Murphy, North Carolina. I mentioned the " Poochie Effect " in last week's Charleston Alley Cats post and  one of the many things I love about the Copa de la Divers...

I've enjoyed welcoming the first signs of Fall here in New York lately as the days get shorter and the air becomes increasingly more brisk however it's important to think of our friends on the West Coast who receive no quarter as wildfires continue to rage across those states.  Natural disasters are a possibility no matter where you live but in the five years I spent in the Bay Area, my greatest fear—besides my irrational phobia of getting eaten alive by a shark— was being helpless in the middle of a major earthquake/fire type scenario.  I'm overcome with sadness for those affected by these current happenings, especially since  I never experienced any of those things firsthand. In truth, I have a hard time even thinking about those situations so it goes without saying I'm not going to be rewatching Jaws or sitting through any sort of disaster movie sometime soon.  Hats are a different story with me for some reason!  I've had my eye on a certain (not telling...

Do you ever hear a recording of your voice and think to yourself, "there's no way that's me" even though you are 100% certain that the voice is in fact yours? Well, I just had that feeling when I went back and read my blog post for a Hickory Crawdads cap back in 2011 . It was only the fourth hat that I had written about and I suppose I don't recognize myself because it feels like I've learned so much about the history of MILB caps over the last eight years. Frankly, it was somewhat liberating to just be writing about a newly acquired cap that I appreciated simply because it reminded me of my youth. Even though the photography in that post is very cringeworthy and the text at the end of the post is mysteriously cut off mid-sentence, I remember being happy that I was  reacquainting myself with the Hickory Crawdads and I'm experiencing similar emotions as I'm revisiting an earlier version of that cap for this week's post. One thing I...