Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

I guess since BirdFest is over, it's finally time to  look at a cap that is not an Orioles affiliate. There is  however a connection between last week's Aberdeen IronBirds post  and the 2000 Utica Blue Sox hat that is this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection.  We know Cal Ripken, Jr. owns the IronBirds but you might be surprised to learn the Utica Blue Sox was the team he bought and moved to Aberdeen. These sweatband tags are consistent with caps from 2000 and 2001 but this cap can't be older than 2001 since that was the team's last season in Utica.  The Carolina Blue MILB batterman here is top-not stuff. Utica doesn't host a minor league team anymore but they were lucky to have Miguel Cabrera play during the penultimate Blue Sox season in 2000. I hold Utica with the same reverence as other classic New York-Penn League locations such as Auburn, Batavia, Elmira, Vermont and Oneonta. While I've gotten my hands on a vintage c

Well, BirdFest sure  flew  by quickly didn't it? Are you proud of me for finally coming up with a name for the Orioles/Maryland-theme I've been running for the past month? And how about that sweet pun to lede this week's post! Nice, right? At any rate, this week's  Fresh Fitted Friday selection  is an Aberdeen IronBirds cap I got in 2013. I've been wanting to write about this one for a long time and now I finally have a reason as it's a Maryland-based team right down to the core. This is the current IronBirds logo. It was designed ahead of the 2013 season by Studio Simon which is a design firm based in Louisville, KY. Sweatband tags are more fun to look at on older caps but this one's cool because you see the "Made in U.S.A." peeking out below the center tag which is sadly far too uncommon these days. You also don't come across too many MILB batterman logos that are silver or grey so this is another neat thing about thi

As a reader of this blog you'll know that in anticipation of spending Thanksgiving in Baltimore, I've spent the last few weeks writing about Orioles-themed hats and I'm happy to say that the peak of Maryland-fest is this 1963 Orioles cap. Unless you are a hardcore O's fan, you'd never know that the Orioles ever wore a hat without a bird on it but they did wear this particular logo for just one season in 1963.  It's a known fact that any given year's baseball card set usually uses photos taken the previous season so after hunting down cards from the 1964 set to find images of this cap, I found that most of the cards featured players wearing caps with the "Lead-off Bird" instead of the "Orange B" logo.  The "Orange B" logo must not have been as much of a fan favorite as "Lead-off Bird" so I'm guessing the Orioles ended up reverting back to the older logo for most of the 1963 season b

Welcome to the second installment of Maryland-fest, hon! Last week's Hagerstown Suns hat shone brightly but week's iteration of the cap is super-rare as it is the one  worn when the team served as Baltimore's Double-A farm in the Eastern League from 1989 to 1992. Cursive script fonts have never been the go-to choice for cap logos but this is my favorite Hagerstown Suns logo because it was so short-lived and it reminds me of my days as a youngster collecting autographs. The classic MILB hat combination: a single New Era sweatband tag and a green underbrim. Perfection.  Some might say snapbacks don't have a place on Fresh Fitted Friday but remember not many Double-A teams wore fitted caps back in the day.  According to Baseball Reference, about half of the 1988 Single-A Suns played on the Double-A team for at least part of the 1989 season so while it might not have seemed like a big promotion at the time, I imagine the fans in Hagerstown all felt like

Over the next few weeks I've got a special theme cooking to feature all Maryland-inspired caps. Now that there is no baseball for me to watch at night, I'm revisiting old seasons of  The Wire  so I'm fully immersed in Balmer, hon and that's truth. First, let's heat things up with this Hagerstown Suns cap from the early 2000's: Look at this happy little guy! Actually if logos aged like people, he'd almost be old enough to rent a car without incurring a Young Driver Surcharge . That's right: the Suns have used this exact logo since 1993. There's also a good chance I'll be spending this Thanksgiving with friends in Maryland so these next few weeks are going to be a warm up for that. As the weather starts to get chilly in most places, nothing heats you up better than the Suns, amirite?  Try the veal.   Actually, I chose to start the Maryland-fest off with this Suns cap because of my appreciation of the MLB teams that have had farms in Hage

It's official. The Houston Astros are 2017 World Series champions and now that there are no more baseball games until the Spring, it's time to remember  the words that the Starks in Winterfell are known to say: "winter is coming." Question: did you like the Game of Thrones  reference? I was going to go 80's Glam/Hair Metal and say, "In the words of Cinderella, 'it's gonna be a long cold winter' without baseball" but I didn't think many of y'all would get the reference. No matter how you put it, the impending winter solstice without games occupying my mind gives me time for pondering (or ruminating, musing, etc.) new quips for the blog however I'm certain everyone in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization will probably use that time to wonder "what could have been" had they won Game 7. As a San Francisco Giants fan, I'm feeling a toxic level of schadenfreude running through me knowing that although my team suc

You guys, the Houston Astros are in the World Series right now! I'm not going to say I told you so, but I did tell you so  and if you don't feel like reading that entire post where I told you so, I'll give you the quick and dirty: I told you so back in March!  One thing that's more important than being right about telling you so is that I want the Dodgers to lose this series so I'm doing my part to root on the Astros by featuring a hat from a team that plays in a city which once hosted an Astros affiliate: the Burlington Bees. This is a brand new addition to my collection and it is certainly going to be one of my most cherished caps as it was a gift from my wife, whose nickname is Bee! How cute is that, y'all?  This is the Bees' official on-field road cap and I prefer this one more than the home version which has the same purplish blue crown but with a yellow gold bill. The Burlington Bees are currently a Class-A affiliate for the Lo