Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Last week's Fowlball post was a lot of fun to write and rising up from the flames of all that fun is another ornithologically tinged cap that also happens to be Arizona-related as well. This Phoenix Firebirds retro cap was part of a 2017 collection produced by Ebbets Field Flannels and sold by Lids. I love the crispness of the white sweatband and grey undervisor here and hope Ebbets' newly kindled partnership with Lids will bring back some of these classic designs from the 1990s. It's difficult to faithfully reproduce logos from the 1990s however Ebbets has a solid hit rate in that regard even though they're better known for their more esoteric releases. I made a plea for Ebbets to retro the Peninsula Pilots cap  and 1983 Portland Beavers in last week's Fowlball post and the quality on this Firebirds cap is what I'd like to see if either or both ever get made. Perhaps Ebbets will fulfill these requests if I keep promoting the other caps from that collection li

I was recently asked again if I had a favorite minor league cap and once more I was unable to field that seemingly simple question! To think it was only a year ago that I last discussed my struggle coming up with a definitive answer in my post on my  Carolina Pescados (Carolina Mudcats - Copa de la Diversion) cap . The hats mentioned in that post still rank highly up there in my view however I should have given a nod to the Nashville Sounds, especially the musically inspired logos Brandiose designed for the team's rebrand in 2015. This week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is the Diamond Era cap from that set which I consider to be a true unsung hero of the collection. This cap was a wedding gift from a good friend of mine I met in college who grew up in Nashville and still lives in Music City today. Thanks again, Nate! I love how the soft nylon material on the inside of these caps serves as a guard against summer heat. I can imagine it must have been especially handy on some h

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

It's been just over a month since I've last featured a snapback but now I feel compelled to write about one after learning some interesting information while researching the origins of the Casper Ghosts last week. I learned that the Pioneer League team was originally known as the Butte Copper Kings, which is a cap that I own and haven't featured yet… until now! The Copper Kings wore this cap logo from 1989 through 1995 however it's clear this one is from the earlier end of that range. The green underbrim is a giveaway that this cap is from before 1994. Also, the  44  on the underbrim tells me this was a game used cap. This cap does not have an MILB tag and the New Era tag resembles the one from my  1992 Tidewater Tides cap . The cleanliness is about the same too.   I don't know who #44 was on the Copper Kings but I can think of three spectacular players who did   have this uniform number:  Hank Aaron ,  Willie McCovey  and  Reggie Jackson . Ano