Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Even though the Midwest League festivities officially wrapped up with last week's Beloit Snappers post, I feel compelled to share one more cap from a team that plays in Wisconsin who is not a member of the league.  The Fond du Lac Dock Spiders play in a   collegiate summer baseball league  called the Northwoods League alongside the Rockford Rivets, Kenosha Kingfish and Battle Creek Bombers.  If those cities sound familiar to you, it's because each of them hosted Midwest League clubs within the last thirty years.  There are a handful of other teams in the Northwoods League with former ties to the Midwest League towns but a big one that comes to mind is the  Waterloo Bucks, whose city I can proudly represent with  my Waterloo Diamonds hat, which as you might recall, kicked off this whole Midwest League party  just over a month ago! This week's Dock Spiders cap was an in-stadium pick-up from a good friend who is a big fan of the blog so there's no way a gif

This week's post is the final installment of my Midwest League extravaganza and we're capping it off with a logo that hasn't changed much since the Beloit Snappers team identity was born in 1995. It's incredible to think that the  surly, possibly constipated, turtle on the  current home cap has not been refreshed much over the past 25 years. By now I should have a label for posts that feature a cartoonish logo that was created in the mid-1990's to appeal to kids but then that tag would apply to half the hats I write about so what's the point in making the effort to point it out, right?  Sorry got off-topic there.  I actually do like this hat for a number of reasons. First, it's green and green is my favorite color. Also, the team's name and logo pays tribute to turtles and I've always felt a strong connection to Testudines order of the Reptilia class. In short, I like turtles! An even cooler part of the story is that apparently t

Until now, I've only written about half of the sixteen cities who currently host a team in the Midwest League and this week's South Bend Silver Hawks cap takes it to the tipping point. For the first three seasons of its existence, the Silver Hawks had an austere cap logo which definitely bucked the trend of the zany animals that many teams started using for their logos in the mid-1990's. In 1997, they finally bit the bullet on that aesthetic and I believe that this week's cap is from that very year. The New Era flag debuted in 1997 so its absence on the sweatband tags tells me that New Era simply used whatever leftover tags they had for that season's Silver Hawks caps. The earliest photos I can find of players wearing this cap is from 1997 but that doesn't mean it didn't appear in 1996. Either scenario is possible, but I'm sticking with the former. I also believe most fans of Minor League Baseball enjoy learning about tea

Wella-wella-wella welcome back, y'all! Last week was way too busy for me to turn in a quality post but we are keeping the spirit of the Midwest League theme going this week with a classic cap from another Iowa-based franchise: the Cedar Rapids Kernels. I've written about the current version of the Kernels cap but in truth, that one has never been my favorite. Virtually every sports team has a logo that I feel is their greatest and to me, this week's cap is the classiest and most elegant logo the Kernels have ever worn. Firstly, a baseball gently emerging from a corn husk is about as Midwest as it gets, folks. Corn's importance in the region is boundless but what I appreciate most about the imagery is it represents new life as every spring, a new season of baseball begins in Cedar Rapids. I've never been to Iowa but teams like the Kernels, Clinton LumberKings and Quad Cities River Bandits have piqued my interest since an early age. The movie F

Sorry y'all. I have to take a break this week but come back next week for a special Midwest League post!

I hope everyone enjoyed the South Atlantic League caps over the last few months but if the volume of posts was too much, that's ok too because I have a more streamlined set of caps on deck for the Midwest League series, which starts off this week with a Waterloo Diamonds snapback from 1993. For their inaugural season in 1989, the Diamonds were a co-op team (aka baseball's version of polyamory) featuring players from the Baltimore Orioles and the San Diego Padres but they were going steady with the Padres  from 1990 through their final season in 1993 . The Waterloo Diamonds were only a team for five years in total and the fact that they  only wore this cap logo for their last two seasons makes it super unique to me. I think a lot of other hat nerds feel the same way because when  Hat Club recently did a retro release, the cap sold out rather quickly and I wouldn't be surprised to see it return sometime soon. The logo is comically large but you would only kn

Something I enjoy doing with this blog is reflecting on previous posts while working on new ones. This week's Fayetteville Generals cap not only harks back to a  Generals snapback that I wrote about just over two years ago  but it also relates to the  Lakewood BlueClaws  which was the first team featured in this run of South Atlantic League caps. What I appreciate most about the Generals logo is that it pays tribute to a legendary figure of the American Revolutionary War from France named Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, or as he's more commonly known, Marquis de Lafayette.   Not only is the team's name derived from his role as a major general of American forces in the war but the city of Fayetteville, NC is also named in Lafayette's honor. I should have mentioned this information when I wrote about the Generals snapback in 2017 but I'm glad to be able to right this wrong now.  One wrong that can't be righted