Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Hello, I am the Baseball Milquetoast and I am a San Francisco Giants fan whose World Series championship dream has been crushed at the hands of Joe Maddon for a second time. His first transgression was that he was the bench coach for the 2002 Anaheim Angels who defeated the Giants and I'm pretty sure his strategies enabled that stupid Rally Monkey. Maddon spent 31 years as a player, coach and manager within the California/Arbitrary SoCal City Name Angels organization and this celebration in 2002 was easily one of the greatest highlights of his tenure. Maddon is now the manager of the Chicago Cubs and his second wrongdoing toward San Francisco came last Tuesday night when the Cubs rallied from a 5-2 deficit to defeat the Giants thus advancing to the NLCS. The wound is too fresh to bear the thought of  sharing a photo of this recent iniquity but for this one you can do an image search without my help. I am however happy to share a photo of a young Joe Maddon when he

I was considering writing about a cap of a minor league affiliate of one of the teams currently in postseason contention but I decided to write about the Oakland Athletics' Triple-A affiliate instead.  The main reason I chose the Nashville Sounds for this week's post is a good friend of mine from Nashville is getting married in Music City this weekend and unfortunately I cannot be there.  Kind of impossible to deny the awesomeness of the f-hole style "N" over a guitar pick. Standard inside tags and panel taping but I figured I'd offer a glimpse in any case. I've written about a few Sounds hats over the years but this newest version of the cap logo might be my favorite yet. It was designed by Brandiose who you know by now is widely recognized as the clear leader in minor league brand architecture.  Made in U.S.A. guarantee. Here's hoping New Era continues to make efforts to produce some of their caps in the States.

Ever since I began writing about my hats on this blog, I had not ever featured a college sports team before today. Well the streak is now ending because today is "Spirit Day" at work. As most will be showing their "team colors" in the office, I will be representing the University of Colorado by wearing this vintage hat that is over twenty years old! Behold the greatness of Black and Gold. I realize that this cap is not on brand with the official  logomark  and its  color  guidelines of my alma matter but I can't help being nostalgic. This cap has the pre-1994 "New Era" and size tags and the panel lining is very similar to this   San Jose Giants cap . Like the  aforementioned SJ Giants cap  you'll notice the green underbrim—albeit more squarish than the Giants cap. Also, while 1994 was the first year all MLB teams switched over to the grey underbrims, it's doubtful that this rule applied at the collegiate and minor league levels. If you are br

One of my favorite parts of this pseudo-weekly communiqué is to tie in some sort of significance to each week's featured hat with a place, thing, event or feeling that I'm experiencing. It's usually something as simple as trying to write about a hat from a city that's been featured in recent news or even one that I'm getting ready to visit.  I was shocked—as I'm sure most other New Yorkers were—by the New York and New Jersey bombings  and I was deeply saddened by Tuesday's fatal police shooting of Keith LaMont Scott .  As I was trying to decide on this week's hat, I wanted to incorporate one with a connection to one of these recent tumultuous events as a way to honor those affected. I don't have a Charlotte Knights hat (yet) and there wasn't a New York hat that I wanted to write about so I looked through my collection for one pertaining to either one of those cities. I was about to give up and write about another Asheville Tourists hat whe

Firstly, many apologies for not posting last week. I should have been more forthcoming about that but as they say: "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen." Aw shucks, y'all know I don't really believe that!  At any rate, with only a few weeks away left in the regular season it's finally setting in for me that David Ortiz's career of playing baseball will be ending as well. As a Giants fan, I'm still salty that he smooth-talked Pablo Sandoval into leaving San Francisco for Boston but then again, Pablo has been a terrible on the Red Sox and the Giants have been fine without him.  I guess one positive of Pablo playing in Boston is that I have more opportunities to heckle him when he comes to New York although it's easier to razz a player if they actually, you know, play . While I've never actively rooted for Big Papi, I respect him immensely and would never boo him. Also, he's huge and he could crush me if I upset him. A while back I de

01/20/2022 update: I fixed the broken image links and some text in the paragraphs below which were a complete mess. Rest assured, I left the overall content and tone consistent with the time in which this post was first published Like John "Hannibal" Smith, I love it when a plan comes together and what I don't love is when a plan falls apart. I intended to a story and some photos of a fresh and new fitted last Friday but my plan was beset by sweltering heat at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. Even though my plan was temporarily halted, I consider myself to be resilient so I'm going to show those photos today. With no further ado, I present to you this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection which is the cap worn by the team of Virginia's state capital, the Richmond Flying Squirrels.  The Flying Squirrels identity was one of the agency's earliest creations when it was known as Plan B Branding and I appreciate that the outline silhou

You've probably noticed that I've been on the snapback tip for the past few weeks and it's not just because of the nasty heatwave we've recently experienced here in New York City. You might remember that my selection of the Elmira Pioneers and Spokane Indians caps were symbolic and this week's is no different.  Tomorrow, August 20, is MCA Day at Littlefield in Brooklyn, NY and I'll be wearing this Asheville Tourists hat with the A logo as a sign of respect for the late Adam Yauch. If you happen to be in the NYC area and are looking for something to do that is fun, inspirational and FREE then you should definitely stop by Littlefield anytime from 12-6 PM on Saturday. This is the cap logo that the Tourists wore from 2005-2010 aka the cap's serious period between the solo reign of Ted E. Tourist  and the arrival of  Mr. Moon . There were 15 seasons of this cap logo but wool versions with grey underbrims are rare because of MLB and MILB's tra