Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

I struggle whenever someone asks me what cap logo is my "favorite" and yet one would think that being unprepared for the same question enough times would prompt me to correct that but alas, I have not. I suppose I have more fun rattling off the first five caps that come to mind as opposed to working with a scripted answer.  If you ask me point blank right now about my "top 5" of current caps, it would include the Asheville Tourists, Vermont Lake Monsters, Norfolk Tides, Hillsboro Hops and Carolina Mudcats. There are plenty of defunct teams out there with caps that make me shed a tear of nostalgia but I figure if someone's asking about caps they want to hear about ones they could easily buy.  Besides the Hops which is a newer team, the rest of those clubs have rebranded a few times but of those remaining four, the only one that's consistently had the same logo for their entire existence is the Mudcats. So when it was time to create an identity for the Copa de

I'm back on the nostalgia tip with this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection which is a Mitchell & Ness retro of the cap the San Diego Padres wore in the early 1980s. That was a great time in my childhood for many reasons but mostly because my baby sister had just recently been born. Plus, I was also just starting to develop interests…such as baseball!  The Padres have recently recommitted to the brown and yellow colorway full-time for their current uniforms and even though I'm certain New Era won't be able to get the logo right, I'd love to see the "Taco Bell" caps make an appearance at some point. My first ever Mitchell & Ness post happened with my Pre-1974 Buffalo Bills - Mitchell & Ness Retro post earlier this year but this is my first write-up for a baseball cap made by the legendary company Am I crazy for wanting to maybe slap on a patch of a smiling mouth so that it looks like the back of the cap is giving you a weird look when you'

Things are heating up around the country and for folks in the midwest, (I think) that means one thing: it's time for some corn, folks! Today is National Corn on the Cob Day and I really have no choice but to show love to the corn on this week's post. My all-time favorite corn-tinged team is the Cedar Rapids Kernels and I've written about two of their most famous logos (both times in the summer months no less) but this time I've got a special treat for y'all as this week's cap is the "Elotes" logo that the Clinton LumberKings have donned since 2019 as part of the Copa de la Diversion campaign. If you look really closely, there's an "E" that's meant to represent the sour cream and cojita cheese components of an elote. Sadly, the writing gets kinda lost in the chili powder and green stuff which I believe represents the lime. I really like the hot pink joining up with the maize on the batterman here and the eyelets really make this cap p

As the first half of 2021 draws to a close, I have been reflecting on this blog's growth since it began ten years ago. And what I mean by growth is the sheer amount of "firsts" I'm able to recognize in posts over the past few months. I had never written about an NBA team before last week and the two Buffalo Bills caps from the beginning of the year were the first NFL hats that I've featured on the blog but I think the "branching out" trend began in earnest with the Slide Sox hat from Christmas Day. I didn't mention it at the time but I believe that Slide Sox hat was my first ever "non-sports related" cap to get the Fresh Fitted Friday honors and this week's Acapulco Gold "Ghost Army" hat marks the second time in the blog's history that this has happened.  I admit that I bought this cap years ago because I thought the logo was cool but not too long after that I learned that the design originated from the Ghost Army, which

I'm switching things up in a major way this week as this 2018 Brooklyn Nets "City Edition" cap marks the first time this blog's ever featured an NBA team and the reason being May 21 is Notorious B.I.G. Day in Brooklyn  and Biggie's affinity for Coogi sweaters is what inspires this design. The Coogi pattern on the bill here makes this cap a must have for any fan of hip-hop, even (self-hating) Knicks fans such as myself :::ducks::: Spreading Coogi love all the way to the sweatband. Thats the Brooklyn way. The silhouette on the NBA logo doesn't have a cool name like "MLB Batterman" and until the design switches to Kobe Bryant, which his hopefully one day soon, I think that's fine. The backstory on the silhouette is actually more interesting than the logo itself so if you want to read more on that, here's a great write-up from 2017 by The Undefeated . This week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is not going on the  Trading Block  however please

If you're the kind of person who keeps up with the National Today calendar, you'll notice I forgot to mention in last week's Asheville Yacumamas post that another reason (besides Mother's Day) I decided to write about the Asheville Tourists "Copa" cap  on that date is because "National Tourism Day" has taken place in the US on  May 7 every year since 1983. Hopefully you forgive my oversight in that instance and in the spirt of continuing on with the National Day trend, today is National Buttermilk Biscuit Day so I’ve got a Montgomery Biscuits alternate cap that I estimate to be from 2004.  I've talked about the Poochie Effect lots here lately but this logo is latter day Poochie rather than the 1.0 Era, which I believe began in 1994 with the advent of the Charleston RiverDogs, Brevard County Manatees, Ottawa Lynx, Albany Polecats and to a lesser extent, Augusta GreenJackets. This sweatband tag set is identical to my  2003 Hudson Valley Renegades

I'm not sure how this blog has been around for ten years without having done at least one Mother's Day post but that all changes today with this Asheville Yacumamas hat! A  yacumama  is a giant snake-like creature that is believed to inhabit the Amazon Rainforest in Peru and means  "Mother of Water"  i n Quechua,  the indigenous  language spoken in the region. The words  yaku  "water" and mama  "mother" come together to describe what according to the  legend, is responsible for the the creation of all water-based life forms. If you're wondering how a yacumama was chosen as Asheville's identity for the Copa de la Diversion campaign then let me regale you with the Cherokee tale of a giant "leech the size of a house" that resided in the Hiwassee River in Murphy, North Carolina. I mentioned the " Poochie Effect " in last week's Charleston Alley Cats post and  one of the many things I love about the Copa de la Diversion