Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

The 2026 World Series has now concluded, and just as I had hoped (and predicted) in last week's post , the Milwaukee Brewers have emerged as champions. And as it happens, their first-ever championship parade and rally are scheduled to begin in downtown Milwaukee this morning at 10 am CT. I hope the team and staff relish every moment of today's celebrations up through the 146 days between now and Thursday, March 25, 2027 which is Opening Day of the 2027 Major League Baseball season. As a self-described purist, I am only begrudgingly giving the slightest credence to the ridiculous "Opening Night" happening the night before the traditional Opening Day! The Brewers will no doubt have a target on their backs next season, but I prefer to look at it as a spotlight because for too long they have not been shown the respect deserved by a team that has won its division five times in the last six years. Righting wrongs aside, people are paying attention to the Brew Crew now, and ...

With the 2026 MLB regular season slowly winding down, I cannot help but reflect on all the fun games I have been to thus far. While it has worked out that I have already been to eight games at CitiField, my totals at Yankee Stadium will only reach half that amount tomorrow as I plan to see the Toronto Blue Jays during their second and final scheduled series in the Bronx this year. I always enjoy seeing the Jays, and this upcoming game is could get spicy because I am rolling in with a crew comprised of two Toronto fans and one Boston Red Sox fan. I caught the Red Sox last season on one of their trips to New York in 2025, but the only Jays game I was able to get to that year was rained out, so considering all this, tomorrow will be extra special. A fair amount of consideration goes into the selection of the caps I wear to ball games, but as you might imagine, the esoteric logos of former Mets and Yankees affiliates do not exactly inspire their fans in New York to stop me in my tracks to ...

The inspiration for selecting a late-era Helena Brewers cap for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday post is that National Beer Day is celebrated annually on April 7. This year's holiday toasts to the 90th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the law allowing people to brew and sell beer, thus effectively ending the Prohibition Era which began in 1920. The backbone of every beer is malt which is comprised of barley and is strongly represented here just as it has been historically on the logos of Helena's parent club in Milwaukee throughout the years. The blue and gold MILB batterman are beautiful against the navy crown here. Made in Bangladesh cap but FYI, you'll need a permit to drink beer with an ABV of higher than 0.5% in Bangladesh. Sadly, Helena lost its team when MILB contracted after the 2019 season and now the closest option for baseball fans in that town to catch games is about two hours away in  Missoula. That's still a far better option than having to ...

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...

It's that time of the year again, folks. The Los Angeles Dodgers are coming to New York to play the Mets. As always, I'm tempted to go just to heckle the Dodgers on behalf of my San Francisco Giants fandom. I'll probably skip this series despite tickets being cheap and plentiful as the Mets are well below .500 which means the fans are done for the season too. If I did go to one of the games, I'd wear my New York Giants hat to troll the Dodgers even though I have the perfect hat for a Dodgers fan to wear: a Great Falls Dodgers cap which I believe to be from the 1996 season.  I've posted photos of my all blue Great Falls Dodgers cap before but this version with a white crown is perfect for summer, besides the fact that I despise the Dodgers and would never actually wear it! The MILB batterman here tells me this cap has to be from 1994 at the earliest. Also, i t's rare to find this cap let alone one with unpopped tags!  The absence of the New Era...

Now that the 2017 regular season has ended, my torture endured as a San Francisco Giants fan is over—what's say you? The Los Angeles Dodgers are favorites to win the National League pennant? My bitter rivals!?!? Nooooooo!  I suppose my only defense is to jinx them by showcasing this vintage cap from the Ogden Raptors who are a longtime Dodgers minor league affiliate.  I know my last attempt to mush the Dodgers didn't work however you don't understand the power of a hat from 2004. T he New York Yankees had the best record in the American League that year yet lost in the ALCS to the Red Sox despite having a 3-0 lead in the series. My guess is this upset was spawned by bad juju performed by a Yankees hater. When the Ogden Raptors cap logo debuted in 1994, it fit in well with the other kid-friendly cartoonish logos being used at the time. Fast forward ten years and the team still used a similar logo for this cap. The dark navy seen here has been replaced with the bl...

It's the penultimate week of the 2017 MLB regular season schedule and I'm feeling rather downtrodden, folks. The crummy Los Angeles Dodgers will clinch their 5th consecutive NL West title tonight or tomorrow and the odds are my poor defenseless San Francisco Giants will be the opposing team in the visitor dugout at Dodger Stadium when that happens. You might recall that last year  I called for black magick to eliminate the Dodgers from the NLCS and I'm desperately in need of sorcery this weekend so the  Giants sweep LA thus preventing Dodgers fans from mocking us as they celebrates. To show I'm serious , this week's sacrifice cap is a former Dodgers minor league affiliate: the Great Falls Dodgers. In all the years I've been doing this dang blog, I never thought I'd ever write about a Dodgers hat but here we are.  While last week's cap featured a Dodger-esque design element, this week's cap is more Dodger-istic, meaning you can 100% ...

It's been just over a month since I've last featured a snapback but now I feel compelled to write about one after learning some interesting information while researching the origins of the Casper Ghosts last week. I learned that the Pioneer League team was originally known as the Butte Copper Kings, which is a cap that I own and haven't featured yet… until now! The Copper Kings wore this cap logo from 1989 through 1995 however it's clear this one is from the earlier end of that range. The green underbrim is a giveaway that this cap is from before 1994. Also, the  44  on the underbrim tells me this was a game used cap. This cap does not have an MILB tag and the New Era tag resembles the one from my  1992 Tidewater Tides cap . The cleanliness is about the same too.   I don't know who #44 was on the Copper Kings but I can think of three spectacular players who did   have this uniform number:  Hank Aaron ,  Willie McCovey  and...

This week's  Fresh Fitted Friday  selection is the official on-field home cap of the Great Falls Voyagers of the Rocky Mountain region's Pioneer League.  This big red "V" over the poison-green planet reminds me of both of what happens when it's your first time seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show in a theatre as well as this insanely awesome TV miniseries from the 80's called... V   Made in U.S.A. tag is a must once again although I would like to see what kind of quality can be produced on the other planets of our solar system... How much I would give to have the MILB batterman be red and poison-green? From 2003 to 2007, this minor league affiliate of the Chicago White Sox went by the name of Great Falls White Sox but enlisted the help of a local advertising agency in Montana named Banik Communications to help them rebrand in time for the 2008 season.  Banik's efforts were a great success and a catchy slogan emerged around it: "...