Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Despite my moral and ethical obligations, I must congratulate the Los Angeles Dodgers for their NLCS win and upcoming return to the World Series. My heart is cold and black so any joy a Dodgers fan feels makes me miserable however I did get some good news this week: there is talk of MLB returning to the great city of Montreal  and maybe Portland, Oregon too! My main issue with Portland getting a team is that while it has a long history of being one of the great Triple-A cities, it hasn't had a team at that level since 2010. I do believe that Portland has the population and the income to support an MLB franchise so I wish them luck. After all, I like the natural rivalry between Seattle and Portland so this could be good. Although I have concerns about Portland's chances, I feel there isn't a city more deserving of a team right now than Montreal. I've spilled much ink lamenting the demise of the Expos so I'd love for Montreal to get another shot. This rumor has

At this point I must admit that last week's call for black magick was useless. Since there's no point in summoning sorcery for this week, I'm just praying the Giants don't get swept by the Padres this weekend and ending the season with 100 losses. Since I'm tuning in to that series while in Atlanta, this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is a Greenville Braves cap. Bonus points for this week's photos at a Pearle Vision in Roswell, GA. And extra bonus points for the 70's interior.  While the  sweatband tags and  satin taping style are consistent with caps I've featured from the mid 1990's, this cap is most likely not from any time before 1999 which is when the New Era flag began to appear on minor league caps. This Joe Nelson card from 1999 is the oldest Greenville Braves card I could find with a player in a cap sporting the New Era flag. Image courtesy of COMC This cap logo is a reminder of how dominant the Atl

If this is your first visit to the blog, I welcome you! And if you're a regular reader, thanks for coming back despite my neglect of minor league caps for the past three consecutive weeks, which might be some kind of record; I'm not sure. Either way, I hope this week's vintage West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx cap makes up for the recent lack of MILB love! This is another cap that came from The Great eBay Haul that I've been writing about over the past few weeks. The Diamond Jaxx rebranding in 2002 was the first big client win for Brandiose , which back then was a just a fledgling design firm known as Plan B Branding. Plan B (now Brandiose) conceived "Jim Dandy" as the mascot for the Diamond Jaxx in 2002. According to Bloomberg Businessweek , "Dandy" is "a Disneyfied version of  a miner wielding a baseball bat modified into a pickax" While every MLB team began wearing New Era's polyester caps with black sweatbands and

This week's Fresh Fitted is a Jackson Generals cap that I picked up in late 2014. I initially thought that this cap's team was the same  Jackson Generals that I knew about in the 1990's but it turns out I was wrong. Check out these photos of this week's selection and then read more about how a team's moniker confused me ever so greatly! I probably love the serifs on the "J" and "G" because I'm a San Francisco Giants fan. This is super classy. Standard sweatband tags but a surprise under the New Era tag lets you know this cap is Made in U.S.A. Black and white MILB batterman? Yes please! Have you ever listened to Johnny Cash and June Carter’s song “Jackson” and wondered whether they were referring to Jackson, Tennessee or Jackson, Mississippi? Well, you might not have but that’s probably because you either don’t care or maybe you just assumed that they were singing about Jackson, TN because Cash spent the last fifty o

Howdy Folks! Once again, it has been far too long since my last dispatch so I decided to make a change to the blog's format in hopes of consistently producing weekly "Fresh Fitted Friday" content. The FFF posts will now solely consist of a few photos with captions and when time permits, I will post in-depth analysis of the cap or its team's history. Those will be less frequent and perhaps a Throwback Thursday sort of thing. I'm eager to see how it plays out as well as hearing your feedback! Mobile: Instagram:  @baseballmilquetoast Twitter:  @FittedFriday Facebook:  Baseball Milquetoast If an oyster (or any other bivalve for that matter) did have a head, its eyes would give you a menacing look such as this. If an oyster decides it's going to use the bottom-half of the letter "B" as its bed, let it be. Over the past few years New Era has employed the cost-saving strategy of manufacturing some of its caps i and I

Just know that the tag has been attached to this cap for over 22 years. That tag could buy you a beer, provided of course that you are of legal drinking age. Also, the tag would need money to purchase the beer and everyone knows tags don't have money. Variations of this logo have been around since the early days of the Memphis Chicks, but this particular version was only used in 1992.  The squarish green underbrim is typical of New Era minor league caps from this period. I am not certain what fabric makes up the inside of the front panel but it seems like this will be a nice breathable cap for the summer months! I've spent the past few weeks celebrating some different New York Yankees fitted caps so I thought it would be a fun change to take a look at a minor league snapback this time around.  As far as minor league hats are concerned, the 1986 Memphis Chicks on-field cap is holy grail for me. This is mostly because Bo Jackson made his debut for the Kansas

This cap features a fun logo from the guys at Brandiose. I always dig their work. This scombrid is a mighty surly one indeed. Notice how the Wahoo is gripping a bat with some mysterious phantom phalanges. I just trademarked "Phantom Phalanges" as a band name, btw. Nothing crazy about these sweatband tags but maybe one day they will seem crazy! That is an MILB batterman logo in Pink, White and Blue. I love it. If you have been keeping up with the blog over the past few weeks, you might have noticed the focus on caps from teams that play in Major League Baseball's spring training states. I've said this many times before, but the most hopeful time of the year for a baseball fan is when spring training reaches its final weeks as it is now. Being a fan of the San Francisco Giants, it pains me to see my team floundering in the spring instead of deftly defending the championship that they won last November. As of publishing time, the Giant