Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Welp I ran out of Carolina League teams to show y'all but that's not shocking considering it's a small league after all.  Until 2016 there were only eight teams in the Carolina League and I've already written about six (seven including last week's Winston-Salem Spirits cap) of the cities with current teams, as well as the Durham Bulls who are no longer in the league.  As for the other cities (both former and current) in the league, there isn't a hat that I've felt the a strong enough need to obtain about besides, of course, the crown jewel of my Carolina League collection: the Peninsula Pilots. Objectively, the logo is nothing special and could easily be confused with a Detroit Pistons hat. In fact, the only other Pilots hat that I ever found was mislabeled as a Pistons hat in an eBay listing. Unfortunately, the seller removed the item before I had a chance to bid on it and for that reason I feel extra fortunate that I found this beater a few years l

I've probably mentioned this more than a few times already but my life-long love for baseball truly is something that's shaped the person I am today. F lipping through baseball cards as a child helped developed my knack for matching names with faces while poring over stats on the backs of those cards led to my o bsession with analyzing data.  As far as the subject matter in this blog, my appreciation for visual aesthetics in design is rooted in hours spent staring at logos on caps and uniforms of ballplayers while organizing my cards and watching games on television. My penchant for nostalgia is so blatant, it should't surprise you that my first hats are ones that resonate the deepest with me. My first MLB caps were the caps worn by the Chicago White Sox and Florida Marlins in the early 1990's and my first MILB caps were the New Haven Ravens, Greensboro Hornets and Prince William Cannons. Because the current theme here is the Carolina League, I've got not one, b

Has it really been almost four months since my last post? Of course that’s a rhetorical question but I still want to explain why I lapsed for so long. The quick answer is I’ve been preoccupied with other activities over the past few months however at some point during that time I should have posted a quick blurb about the hiatus but I kept getting distracted. I also lost interest in all things baseball as I saw my San Francisco Giants play terribly once again this year and now that the regular season has come to a close, I’ve decided to hate-watch the NLCS. For the second year in a row, the Los Angeles Dodgers are clear favorites to win the pennant but I’m going to be rooting for the Milwaukee Brewers in the series. This petty tactic is the reason why this week’s Fresh Fitted Friday selection is a Carolina Mudcats cap as they are the Class A affiliate of the Brewers in the Carolina League. How fortuitous that I just happened to have the tags still on this cap that's ov

5/11/2023 Update: So between this post from 2018 and now I've learned a lot more about the nuances of the caps in my collection and a very important example of this was brought to my attention by a  @xclickaroox  who I feel is a must-follow on Instagram. At any rate, this good sir and I recently completed a trade of some fun MILB caps and during our talks he alerted me to the fact that the the hat from this post from 3/23/2018 is actually a 1990 Miami Miracle cap. The key distinguishing factor here is that the undervisors on Fort Myers Miracle caps were grey while Miami's were green as is the case with the cap in this post. The other discrepancy is that the Fort Myers cap feature a TM on the logo while the Miami caps do not. At any rate, I love finding out new things about my caps so if anyone ever finds issues with what I've written, please reach out.  One last note for posterity's sake: I won't update the verbiage below because it would take a bit more effort than

I had some trouble deciding which hat to write about this week, y'all. As much as I want to show off some of the newer caps in my collection, I've got all of these super rare vintage selections just begging to be flaunted. Also, I love themes so I couldn't turn down the chance to write about another Class A Short Season league for the seventh week in a row.  The Bend Rockies played in the Pacific Northwest League from 1992-94. The inaugural team was mostly comprised of selections from the 1992 draft while its parent team  would not play a game until the following year. Even though it's possible this cap is from 1994, I highly doubt it considering the tags are of the pre-1992 variety.  The lack of the MILB batterman here seals the deal; this cap is either from 1992 or 1993 as the batterman did not appear until 1994. Ideally, I'd like to believe that this cap is from the 1992 season as it would be the first time in the blog's history that I'

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

For those who  don't care about details pertaining to the materials New Era used in its caps over the years, I   admit that the posts from the past few weeks haven't been super exciting. But then again, would anyone who didn't at least have a passing interest ever purposefully come to this blog in the first place? What is exciting (for me at least) is I found a backup for the Denver Zephyrs hat that I wrote about in the early years of Baseball Milquetoast.  This is a hard one to find and I'm glad it didn't cost me an absurd amount of money.  The cap logo is a little frayed but consider this: when the Denver Zephyrs suited up for their last game in 1992, a good majority of my co-workers were not born yet. So let's just think about that for a moment. Not the crispest sweatband but what can you do? Like I said earlier, this cap couldn't have been worn by a Denver Zephyr after 1992 and these sweatband tags seem to be most consistent with caps from 199

Considering one of the earliest minor league baseball caps I ever owned was a Greensboro Hornets one, it's hard to believe it's taken me this long to write about this team's hat. Well, I suppose that's only partially true as I once posted a 1996 Greensboro Bats cap but I'm really glad to finally show some love to this iconic gem. Greensboro only had this cap logo from 1990 through 1993, but it was glorious while it lasted A red hornet is not one you want to tangle up with, especially not one wielding a bat The sweatband tags here are identical to those found on my post of this Everett Giants cap Grey underbrim, white sweatband and the absence of the New Era and MILB  batterman logos is the best combination  When I first started going to Norfolk (then-Tidewater) Tides games as a youth in the early 1990's, I'm not sure if I knew there was any difference between the players I was watching on the field and the ones from televised games