Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

The Wingure (winged creature) theme continues this week with the Augusta GreenJackets and I started the party early this past Wednesday with a St. Patrick’s Day post on Instagram featuring the Pro-Line cap the team wore from 1994-2005. The reason it's not this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is because I already featured it in a blog post in August, fittingly enough, of 2011 which was a few years before I created my Baseball Milquetoast account on Instagram! I've apparently developed a little biennial St.Patrick's Day tradition with the GreenJackets here as I wrote about my New Era version of the hat to celebrate the holiday back in 2019. This year's honoree is a Diamond Era version of alternate cap logo the GreenJackets wore before their Brandiose rebrand in late 2017. I dig how the “G” integrates a “J” into it as a nod to the GreenJackets name and that the bottom serif on the “J” has a sort of stinger effect. My brother-in-law's initials are "J.G.&q

In this week's episode of Did You Know…? , I've got a fun little fact to share about today's date that I just recently learned which is March 12 is National Girl Scout Day! For those of us who were not in a troop, the most immediate association commonly had when discussing Girl Scouts is the cookies and to be honest, I was guilty of this before I did a little research. As I dug deeper in reading up on this incredible organization, I learned how it provides an inclusive, all-female environment that nurtures   leadership development skills to all the girls! You're now probably wondering how this ties into a blog about baseball hats. The connection there is through my exploration I learned that  Juliette Gordon Low (founder of the  Girl Scouts of the USA ) is from Savannah, GA which reminded me of my Savannah Sand Gnats cap that has been sitting in my closet for far too long. The Savannah Cardinals rebranded as the Sand Gnats in 1996 which as we know was during the early y

Last week I promised that the landing gear was going down on the recent theme of caps with the letter "B" and I'd say it was a success… B-sides  not coming up with a catchy name for the run ! Fun puns notwithstanding,  this week's Boise Hawks hat will be the last of these "B" caps and like all the previous ones, it features a logo that has been decommissioned for a while now. This cap logo variant was first unveiled in November 2006 by Brandiose, which back then was known as Plan B Branding. Should "Plan B" have been the name of this theme all along?!?! Made in USA! As an aside, Boise enlisted  Brandiose to tweak their identity some more again in 2013 , which was right around the time I procured this cap. This was great timing because sadly soon after that year is when New Era ramped up the production of foreign-made MILB caps. This is a very distinctive colorway for the MILB batterman and eyelets and I'm really into it! I mentioned earlier tha

I've got plenty of caps left to write about featuring the letter "B" in the logo however I'm looking to wind down this current theme so that I can move onto other subject matters that I've been meaning to cover. Until then though, I must fall back on one of my favorite parlor tricks which is featuring yet another obsolete team identity from the mid-1990's! This week's Binghamton Mets snapback is one I estimate to be from 1995-96. Binghamton sported this exact logo design from 1995 all up until 2017 which was the year they rebranded as the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, which is the team's name currently. I have no idea how the bee in the logo is connected to the city however the reason for the team's new name stems from Binghamton being known as "The Carousel Capital of the World". The lack of New Era flag branding on the sweatband tags hints this is a pre-1997 cap. Because this logo only first appeared in 1995, I'd say this cap is from th

Shortly after publishing last week's Bangor Blue Ox post , I realized that I was in the midst of a nice little streak of featuring hats from Northeast cities whose name begin with the letter "B" (ie. Buffalo, NY and Bangor, ME) thus this Batavia Clippers retro cap from Ebbets Field Flannels seemed like a natural fit for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection.  Batavia's affiliation with the Philadelphia Phillies lasted from 1988-2006 and the team heavily leaned on their parent club when it came to uniform design for the first ten years of their arrangement, after which they rebranded as the Batavia Muckdogs. This permutation of the Phillies "P" into a "B" was only in use from 1991 and 1992 but because those were two prime years during the height of my early obsession with baseball, this logo is the first one that comes to mind whenever the Batavia Clippers are discussed. I cannot say enough good things about the quality Ebbets put forth on

I hope everyone has enjoyed the "Buffalove" over the past five weeks and if you didn't that's ok because at least you got to momentarily experience the blog delving into the realm of football, which was definitely a new sort of sensation for me after all these years! Another first that I'm excited about is this week's Bangor Blue Ox cap is the first-ever Northeast League cap to be featured here. It might seem hard to believe that even in this blog's tenth year  I'm still finding new leagues to write about but I think the sheer volume of obscure teams out there is a testament to the widespread reach that baseball has across this country. This cap came to me as part of a larger lot purchase and I have to admit I had no idea what team used this logo when I first saw it. Thankfully the hat nerds on Instagram were out in full force that day and provided me with an answer within minutes! The sweatband on this cap is rather soiled and I have to admit I'm

This week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is a retro production of a 1959 Buffalo Bisons cap and let me tell y'all, in an alternate timeline this hat would be taking us into a Super Bowl weekend where the Buffalo Bills would be playing in the big game for the first time since 1994! Well, if "if's" and "but's" were candy and nuts that would be friggin' awesome because that would mean my plan of featuring Buffalo hats up through the Super Bowl came together. But it didn't. But  that doesn't matter because this logo's simplicity is just too perfect to pass up this week. I can't imagine anyone on the street will recognize this logo for what it is but that's ok. Maybe I'll hear "Boston Sucks" or perhaps someone will think it's a Birmingham Barons cap. Whatever happens, I'm ready for it because I will hit them with the story behind this hat no matter what! Made in U.S.A. is something Ebbets Field Flannels has