Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

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

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%

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: "

I'm not sure if this is a record or not but I realized just as I sat down to write this post that it's been exactly two months since I've written about a snapback. Now while that Yakima Bears cap had some serious age on it, this week's Albuquerque Dukes hat is even older. As a San Francisco Giants fan, I'm typically opposed to showing any sort of enthusiasm toward the Los Angeles Dodgers and their affiliates but this Dukes cap is really great even though it's a red hat which I'm not into for obvious reasons. The team wore this cap from 1985 through their final season in Albuquerque which was in 2000. Baseball card photography from the late 80's and early 90's leaves a lot to be desired––as does the photography in the early years of this blog as I'm well aware––so I am not sure which exact year they switched over to grey underbrims. If you clicked on the link in the caption above you'll get to one of my first posts on this blog

I guess since BirdFest is over, it's finally time to  look at a cap that is not an Orioles affiliate. There is  however a connection between last week's Aberdeen IronBirds post  and the 2000 Utica Blue Sox hat that is this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection.  We know Cal Ripken, Jr. owns the IronBirds but you might be surprised to learn the Utica Blue Sox was the team he bought and moved to Aberdeen. These sweatband tags are consistent with caps from 2000 and 2001 but this cap can't be older than 2001 since that was the team's last season in Utica.  The Carolina Blue MILB batterman here is top-not stuff. Utica doesn't host a minor league team anymore but they were lucky to have Miguel Cabrera play during the penultimate Blue Sox season in 2000. I hold Utica with the same reverence as other classic New York-Penn League locations such as Auburn, Batavia, Elmira, Vermont and Oneonta. While I've gotten my hands on a vintage c