Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Writing last week's post, I had a vision as to how the next few days would unfold regarding the Presidential election of 2016 and how it would relate to the next post here. Well  I was totally wrong in my assumption but regardless of that, if you love baseball then just know I want you to come here every week so I promise the political tie-ins will be minimal! I really did think I'd be so clever by writing about Iowa's Clinton LumberKings. I asumed I'd be making a wink and a nod toward the team's host city as well as the name of the candidate who I had assumed would be the President-elect of the United States at this time.  Do you recall  last week's homage to a burly hirsuite man ? He was wielding a long wooden apparatus meant to be used against a round ball, too! The lack of an MILB batterman logo on the cap's rear and the squarish grey underbrim is similar to most Pro-Line caps from the mid-1990's. The iniside tags are consistent w

At this point last week I made a desperate plea for Joe Maddon and the Chicago Cubs to swiftly "take care" of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS…because I hate the Dodgers. Well, a week has passed and the Cubs are one win away from making that request a reality. The end of the Dodgers season basically means I can stop worrying about them potentially being World Series champions. This frees up lots of time for fall activities such as getting in Halloween mode by watching horror and sci-fi type movies. Like any normal person I enjoy movies about supernatural elements that set out to destroy the world (or small towns) and the supernatural forces that aim to defeat those forces. A lot of times sorcery is involved and I'm very cool with wizards. FYI, I especially appreciate wizardry that incorporates baseball so I would be thrilled if Joe Maddon could cast a spell on the Dodgers bats, turning them into papier mâché from wood. Also, I like when clubs have Wizar

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

If there's one thing about Ebbets Field Flannels that I appreciate the most, it's that they take great lengths in reproducing what seems like the most obscure caps ever made and that almost all of the caps that they release have the following features: wool broadcloth, a horse hair buckram crown and satin taping. This particular replica is one of the 1969 Clinton Pilots. I don't have any other ballcaps with the "scrambled egg" design on the visor and that's probably because I'm usually not crazy about it being used on non-miltary hats. My childhood hometown had a large population of military personnel so respect for the armed services is inherent with most of the population.  Maybe that's why I feel as though the "scrambled egg" strictly belongs on military headware and as much as I respect the history of the design, I surely welcome it more than the so-to-speak "patriotic" designs that are MLB-approved. Since I'

Update : While I originally stated that this cap was probably from 1992, I really should have also mentioned that 59Fifty tags didn't appear until 1994. I've seen New Era use older, leftover tags on caps, if this is really from 1992 then this is interesting because they applied a 59Fifty tag from 1994 on a cap with a green underbrim and no MILB batterman. Either I've been wrong about the 59Fifty tag first appearing in 1994 or they ran out of the 1992 tags at some point in the manufacturing process and had to use the ones from 1994 ahead of time, which is so weird. Update (4/20/2019) : This blog has been a learning experience for me over the years but sometimes new information comes to light so I've got to fall on my sword about something here. The previous update to this post mistakenly states that the 59Fifty tag first appeared in 1994 but I've seen caps from 1992 and 1993 that have it so there's that.  More importantly, I should mention that the only Rive