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Showing posts with the label 1997

1997 Lowell Spinners - Fresh Fitted Flannel Friday!!!

Even though this is only my sixth post in the last 14 weeks, this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection breaks a consecutive streak of hats featuring orange and/or green. While this is not a significant piece of information for you to know, I like keeping track of tidbits like that so that I do not place undue emphasis on any one particular color or theme. One area where I do enjoy being consistent is using this blog to connect my hats with current events as well as my own personal experiences. I also enjoy relating fun holidays to caps I own such as this Lowell Spinners on-field in tribute to "National Flannel Day" by  weaving in its connection to the rich history of textile production of Lowell, Massachusetts.  I love how the baseball is incorporated into this logo so much it might actually be my all-time favorite cap worn by a Red Sox farm club. The New Era "Flag" design came about in 1997 which is the year I would say the other sweatband tags here were used.

1996-97 Bangor Blue Ox

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

1997 New Britain Rock Cats

Welcome back folks! I’m happy to report I’ll be picking up this week right where we left off before the break as I’ve got yet another classic, yet now-defunct, Eastern League relic for this week’s Fresh Fitted Friday post. It’s been five years since my New Britain Rock Cats snapback blog post and unsurprisingly the logo on this fitted version of the cap seems just as wacky to me now as it ever has! The lack of an embroidered New Era flag on the outside of the cap tells me this cap is definitely from before 1999 but we will need to look under the hood for the whole story. These New Era and MILB tags were last used in 1996 so it’s safe to say those tags are leftovers from those years and that this cap is actually from 1997 as that is when this particular size tag first appeared. A nice and flat MILB batterman is one of those small touches that I miss most from the caps of yesteryear. The Rock Cats logo has always been an enigma to me. On one hand I appreciate them adopting a fresh and

1997 South Bend Silver Hawks

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

1997 Richmond Braves - Fresh Fitted Friday!!!!

I was planning on continuing my deep-dive into Eastern League caps however this past week's discussion over Jim Thome's preference that his Hall of Fame plaque not feature the  Chief Wahoo  caricature sparked something that I need to address here. As much as I love baseball's rich history, that appreciation should never cause someone else to suffer. I understand that Chief Wahoo has been a part of the Cleveland Indians' branding since the 1940's but I encourage everyone to please take a moment to think about how different this country was back then. Racial segregation was still in full effect and people of color were constantly subjected to insensitive language and tormented on a daily basis  in general . We've come a long way since then in terms of treating each other with respect and I would be sad to think the end point for that progress is sports fans unwillingness to recognize that a seemingly harmless mascot or logo can in fact be extremely hurtful

1997-98 Norwich Navigators - Fresh Fitted Friday!!!!

For this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection from The Great eBay Haul, I decided to continue riffing on the reptile theme from last week's Wisconsin Timber Rattlers post with this Norwich Navigators cap from 1998. Get it? Navi-GATORS?!?! HAHAHAHA The Albany-Colonie Yankees of the Eastern League moved to Norwich, CT in 1995 and their rebrand as the Navigators lasted until the 2006 season when they became the Connecticut Defenders. In 2010, the team moved to Virginia and ever since have been known as the  Richmond Flying Squirrels which was a rebrand helmed by Brandiose. The logos and sweatband tags are spot on with other caps that are tagged here as 1998 but as we saw with last week's Timber Rattlers cap, the lack of a New Era flag is not always a dead giveaway that a cap is from before 1999. Just like with last week's cap, I've seen lots of 1999 baseball cards where players wore Navigators caps without the flag.  One last item of note th

Cleveland Indians 1997 World Series Cap - Fresh Fitted Friday

If you've been coming around here the past few weeks, you know that I've been on a crazy Tim Raines tear but I'm going to pause on covering his former teams to talk  about this Cleveland Indians 1997  World Series cap. The differences between its tags and  last week's Florida Marlins cap from the very same year got my head spinning so here we are!   Of course, it's important to remember that there were no hard and fast rules — only guidelines — when it came to which tags New Era would use on its caps. The main reason for this differential probably has as much to do with available supply as anything else. Hopefully you enjoy taking a look at this one! The Cleveland Indians primarily used this version of the ever-controversial "Chief Wahoo" cap logo during the 1997 World Series. This one is considerably larger than the logo seen on their 2016 World Series cap . Just like with last week's Florida Marlins 1997 World Series cap, this patch is

Florida Marlins 1997 World Series Cap - Fresh Fitted Friday!!!!

After writing about Tim Raines and his connection to the New York Yankees  1996 World Series cap last week, I wanted to cover  another cap from a team that Raines played for.  I was also itching to write about another World Series cap which is why   I'm glad I found this 1997 Florida Marlins cap.  Even though Raines wasn't on the team in 1997, he did spend his last season there in 2002. Sadly, I o nce again need to come clean to state that I do not own this cap. The good news in that admission is that if you head over to eBay fast enough the cap can be yours! Of course I'm not going to provide a link to it or anything but hopefully you can forgive me for that. My opinion often wavers when it comes to colorway preferences, but I dig the teal & black more in comparison to the all-teal and all-black versions.  Not much of a difference between the 1997 World Series patch and the one from the year before  but this patch has become somewhat iconic over time.