Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Any country worth the dirt their trees are planted in should have a holiday to pay homage to their land's woody perennial plants and those of us in the United States observe National Arbor Day on  the last Friday of April which happens to be  today! The holiday dovetails nicely with Earth Day and I happened to celebrate both in 2023 with retro caps of the  1940 Oakland Oaks  and a  1948 Oakland Oaks   produced by Ebbets Field Flannels . The current state of Ebbets is dreadful but I am so thankful I purchased as many caps as I did because soon enough those caps will become vintage relics themselves!  Moving my focus to current things that are thriving, I am celebrating the trees this year with an Asheville Tourists retro designed by  @djmach716  of the New Era store in Buffalo, NY. M y friend  @yellowsub73   came through once again with a clutch assist for which I am so thankful as this version of the Tourists logo hardly ever gets t...

My pre-jitters of the pre-season have subsided with the first game of the 2025 Spring Training is in the books as the  Chicago Cubs beat the Los Angeles Dodgers to the score of 12-4. I look forward to more Dodgers losses as well as the first San Francisco Giants win that I hope comes in their first Spring Training game of the year which is this Saturday against the Texas Rangers. The Giants made some respectable off-season moves but thankfully nothing so crazy where my expectations are too outsized. While I'm neither a Yankees nor Mets fan, as a New Yorker I have to say things are always better when our teams play well, which unfortunately neither did against the Dodgers in last year's postseason. Now is not the time to hark back to the past though as the best recovery from the Yankees Game 5 embarrassment in the 2024 World Series is to win their Spring Training opener against the Tampa Bay Rays today. I would like to see them ride that energy all the way to another ...

After spending dozen years writing entries in this blog there are not many "firsts" that come along so when I realized that I had not yet done a proper Valentine's Day post for Fresh Fitted Friday , I knew right away that I should bring out the Inland Empire 66ers of San Bernardino "Cherubs" by the inimitable DJ Mach at the flagship New Era store in Buffalo, NY. The metallic threading here is the most recognizable difference between the 66ers "Cherub" cap design and the Buffalo-exclusive that I'm featuring today. I love how it makes the Tiffany—or Tuscan, depending on your preference of terms—font pop here. The team issued "Cherub" also lacks the side-stitched arrows DJ Mach included which is much appreciated as they are synonymous with Cupid in classical mythology.  The "Genuine Merchandise" tag is something that I started seeing on MILB caps that I've purchased over the last few years, most notably starting with the 1982 D...

I have been saving this 1994 Appleton Foxes retro on deck for a long while in anticipation of Ichiro Suzuki's inevitable inclusion in the 2025 Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) Hall of Fame announcement which occurred earlier this week. That bit of good news was certainly a welcome reprieve from the grief brought on by the passing of Bob Uecker. And even though Suzuki never had a single at-bat in the minor leagues, I chose this cap worn by the former Seattle Mariners affiliate in the Midwest League because it represents the big league club's Tealism years, which comprise the era many of us associate with him. The only year the Foxes featured the Mariners colorway in their caps and uniforms was 1994 however this retro has a colorflip effect by featuring a metallic silver fill on the logo lettering rather than teal which you can see in the last photo at the bottom. The shine of the metallic silver here seems like a lot to handle but I am interested in seeing h...

At the time of writing, the New York Mets and New York Yankees have both come away as NLDS and  ALDS champions respectively and I could not be more excited about the increased possibility of my first Subway Series as a resident of New York! The rest of the country is more likely to drool at the prospect of a World Series in which the Yankees face off against the Los Angeles Dodgers and even with that, the San Francisco Giants fan in me would be thrilled to watch the Dodgers lose on baseball's biggest stage. And my third best outcome would be for the San Diego Padres to have a chance to avenge their 1998 World Series loss against the Yankees but I'm holding out hope for the Mets as of now! These  scenarios all assume the Yankees come out on top in their ALCS matchup against either the Detroit Tigers or Cleveland Guardians but neither of these teams appear to be the pennant winners for this season in my estimation. Well, hopefully I did not just jinx the whole thing but if I did...

Building on last week's Peninsula Pilots post was no easy task as that hat has been high on my  Wish List  for a long while. So it only makes sense for me to now bring attention to an equally important cap in my collection which is a 1989-92 Tidewater Tides retro which was a recent in-store only release from  @djmach716  at the flagship New Era shop in Buffalo, NY. Once again my friend  @yellowsub73  came through in the clutch by no doubt pushing for this cap to get the retro treatment as well as going to the trouble of purchasing it on my behalf but shipping it to me here in New York City. The flagship is the first ever store to retro this design from over thirty years ago and the hype around it will no doubt spawn more releases. After so many years of searching for a vintage version of a cap featuring this logo that is so dear to me, I was just about ready to give up when I caught wind of this release. The green undervisor here is historically accurate, f...

There are a lot of happenings in the world of sports besides baseball this weekend so for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday I wanted to find a way to tie in the Kentucky Derby as well as the culmination of the first round playoffs in the NBA. Any horse-related cap I own has already been written about here which leads me to the realm of Philadelphia Phillies minor league teams despite the fact that I know fully that their team name has nothing to do with horses because of this article from SportsLogo.net . This brings me to this beautiful powder blue Batavia Clippers fauxback from the Buffalo New Era store. The former New York-Penn League team was a Phillies affiliate from the time I started paying attention to Minor League baseball in the late 1980s and early 1990s so I will always associate them with Philadelphia and to see this power blue blue "motif" warms my heart. The fuzzy feelings continue with the white sweatband and grey undervisor here. Staying true to what would...

It has been over five years since my  1980-92 Reading Phillies snapback  post so I am extra excited bout this this week's  Fresh Fitted Friday  which is a special one because I am finally able to feature a fitted version of the cap. This cap is one of the many stunning MILB releases by the one and only  @djmach716  from New Era shop in Buffalo, NY. Back in August I featured the  "New Era Buffalo Exclusive" Vermont Expos  which was also obtained from the flagship via an assist from my friend  @yellowsub73 . I was hesitant to name which other caps I wanted to scoop up from the store however this week's Reading Phillies hat marks the first revelation of that set and soon enough I will be sharing more from my recent haul. This is about as close as you can get to the 1980s Reading Phillies logo and I am fairly certain we won't see a retro this good ever again. My fear is based on releases in the recent past where the bigger stores have messed up t...

The Vermont Expos hat I picked for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday post builds on last week's themes of Vermont, Phish and the Expos affiliates and its one that I do not anticipate seeing anyone else wearing around any time soon as it is part of a limited production run of "fantasy" caps from  @djmach716  of New Era shop in Buffalo, NY. Fantasy logos is breathe new life into classic designs and I'm excited for this being the first of such hats that I've picked up from DJ via an assist from my friend  @yellowsub73 . There's a few more that I'm looking to scoop up but of course just to be on safe side, I am holding off on specifying which ones until that moment that I have actually procured them. As a native Virginian, I tend to gravitate caps with logos featuring the letter "V" and even though I know this one is not for my home state. The only thing that I don't love here is the red stitching on the white panels but I've used my seam-...

I was planning on taking off this week on account of the holiday weekend but then I remembered that I'm coming off a nice-sized break so I decided to up the ante and do a long-winded  double-cap post which is something I am fairly certain was last done with vintage and retro Jacksonville Expos caps  I wrote about in 2017. Otherwise, the closest I've come to such a thing in recent years was with consecutive posts of very similar hats worn by the  Albany-Colonie Yankees which was also in 2017 as well as the vintage and retro 1988-92 Buffalo Bisons caps  in 2021. This week's double-cap post features the logo the Denver Bears wore from 1982-84 which has been my most sought after design ever since I got serious about hat collecting many years ago. As I've stated in previous posts, I went to college in Colorado which probably explains why most things related to the Centennial State are of interest to me. As is the case with many hat hoarders, it all began with ...