Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

This week's Stockton Ports hat is similar to last week's High Desert Mavericks cap in that they are both California League caps that I was completely certain I had already featured but alas, had not. I  wish I had a cool backstory here but to be completely honest, I don't even remember when I purchased it.  I tried digging through my emails for a confirmation for more details and the closest I got was one from 2015 for a purchase for "STO NE AU ROAD 5950 CAP RYL/SCARLET-HAT" which isn't too descriptive but  "STO" seems to be an appropriate abbreviation for "Stockton" and  the colorway listed checks out for the  Ports "road" cap. The Ports road cap is my favorite of all the versions they currently wear. I love the anchor's hook piercing the baseball and the colorway surrounding the "P" reminds me of the Peninsula Pilots , which, as I've mentioned before is one of my all-time favorite cap logos. Made in U.S.A. qua...

It seems like lately I haven't been able to come up with an answer to this very simple question: what is it that makes a minor league ballcap interesting? In the past I argued that a minor league team's cap logo is inherently more interesting if it has very little resemblance to that of its parent club.  Yet, I've also recently applauded caps that make an interesting allusion to their parent clubs while maintaining a local sensibility in the logo. The latter is certainly the case with this Stockton Ports cap: An item of note is that the Stockton Ports have long-believed that the  Ernest Thayer poem "Casey at the Bat" was based on their team. While that might or might not be true, I like that they believe it enough to use an image of a Mudville Nine batter-man, who himself is wearing a pillbox cap with an M on it. I love meta-caps! As for the production year on this cap, there is no evidence of it before the 1994 season. It's not often-see...