Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

Without a doubt, the biggest sports news of the week was the 2026 Winter Olympics gold medal wins by the United States women's national ice hockey team last Friday, followed by the men’s first gold since the "Miracle on Ice" team of 1980—exactly 46 years after that team's historic victory—this past Sunday. After watching those wins I instantly knew I wanted to celebrate each of them so this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is the  "Go USA!" variant of the  Ghost Army design by Efra Sanchez (aka @chamucosstudio  on Instagram) for The Clink Room. This is the third Ghost Army  cap I've featured here but the first time I've featured Clinker Efra's reimagining of the insignia that is now widely associated with the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops years after the story of these masters of wartime deception finally became known to the public. I missed out on the first Ghost Army release at The Clink Room but feel this "Go USA!" colorw...

Just as I anticipated, I'm back within a month of my last post and just the thought of regularly writing again is very comforting as this summer has been busier than usual for me. I'm now mentally preparing myself for autumn and all the fun activities that I associate with the season with the top item of that list being Halloween! The tradition of remembering the departed is celebrated around the world throughout different times of the year and can known by a variety of names. For  example, in China and many parts of Southeast Asia, the Ghost Festival, also known as the Zhongyuan Festival, takes place on the 15th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar, which is today on the western calendar. One aspect of Ghost Festival is that spirits that are ignored are thought to create mischief and those wily activities are the inspiration for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection whose gold lightning bolts on are designed to pay tribute to the “Ghost Army” which was a tactica...

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...