Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

It has been a wild past few weeks here in New York as the Knicks journey to their first championship in 53 years has been achieved and just yesterday the team was feted with a parade for the ages.  I am not big on crowds  so I walked around the parade area before it kicked off as well as after its conclusion and even those were special experiences I will not soon forget. I have published over 500 entries to this blog and even though I have  mentioned my Knicks fandom in three separate posts , I have only featured two caps of NBA teams and neither was the Knicks! The reason for this is I have not yet found a Knicks hat that I love so this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is a different sort of blue and orange gem to honor the team's historic W. I was fortunate to grow up in Norfolk where I spent summers watching so prospects of the New York Mets farm system and always felt a kindred connection to the organization's lower levels, especially the  Jackson Mets...

This week's  Fresh Fitted Friday post marks the second snapback I've written about this year and while that has been the average amount recently, looking back at years like 2015 and 2017 give a good glimpse into the kind of attention I have given to snaps previously. In retrospect, I could have also waited until tomorrow to share photos of this hat for a  Snapback Saturday post! Being retrospective is actually a driving force in selecting this particular snapback this week and folks who dig  deep into the archives also know that I have mentioned on multiple occasions that Phish is my favorite band and has been the inspiration for quite a few posts. A bit of reverence for the past is the reason Phish turned back the clock to 1992 with the song selection during the first night of its  current Madison Square Garden residency for their 92nd show at the legendary venue. C orrelating the songs chosen for their setlists with songs that were commonly played that year is a ...

There are a lot of happenings in the world of sports besides baseball this weekend so for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday I wanted to find a way to tie in the Kentucky Derby as well as the culmination of the first round playoffs in the NBA. Any horse-related cap I own has already been written about here which leads me to the realm of Philadelphia Phillies minor league teams despite the fact that I know fully that their team name has nothing to do with horses because of this article from SportsLogo.net . This brings me to this beautiful powder blue Batavia Clippers fauxback from the Buffalo New Era store. The former New York-Penn League team was a Phillies affiliate from the time I started paying attention to Minor League baseball in the late 1980s and early 1990s so I will always associate them with Philadelphia and to see this power blue blue "motif" warms my heart. The fuzzy feelings continue with the white sweatband and grey undervisor here. Staying true to what would...

The 2026 MLB season ended just over a week ago, and it already feels like so long ago that it is hard to imagine there being 20 more weeks before I watch a big league game again. Luckily, the MLB app offers plenty of content like highlights and full-game options from  the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico (LMP) , Dominican Professional Baseball League (LIDOM) and Arizona Fall League . Sadly, my hat collection is lacking in the Latin American department, and my Arizona Fall League quota needs attention as well. While I considered pivoting to a Buffalo Bills hat or perhaps one from The Clink Room, today being National Basketball Day seems like the right opportunity to showcase a rather neglected NBA cap of mine for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday post. For some background, the holiday's date commemorates the birth of Dr. James Naismith (born November 6, 1861), who invented the game of basketball after completing his YMCA physical director training program in Springfield, Massachusetts....

My trip to the Valley of the Sun last week was filled with so many top-notch memories which were capped off by my wife taking me to a Phoenix Suns game that we enjoyed with some great friends who live out there. In short, I am just blown away by my wife's thoughtfulness on my birthday especially after having taken me to a New York Knicks game last year! While I relish the thought of attending a baseball game on my birthday, enjoying a quality hoops matchup in great seats is always welcomed and this year my wife upped the ante by gifting me a sweet Phoenix Suns hat I rocked to the game and am featuring for this week's Fresh Fitted Friday post! Would you believe this is the only the time I've written about an NBA hat on this blog? Well neither would I but I actually searched the archives and only found this Brooklyn Nets "City Edition" post so now I do believe it! Even though the Suns were founded in 1968, my brain is focused on those 1990s teams all the colorful ...

The blog needed a cleanse after last week's Dodgers-adjacent post, and while I was hoping for this week's theme to be a celebration of the New York Yankees clinching their ALDS series, their season is now over after being swept by the Tampa Bay Rays.  Five months have passed since the last time I shared a Yankees cap here  and it is hard to believe that their record was 26-13 at that point. A lot can change during the course of a game, let alone over a stretch of a few weeks, months, or years, and yet, the ALDS outcome is fitting considering the Yankees' 93-68 regular season record was second best to the Rays. As a Giants fan, all that matters to me now is that the Los Angeles Dodgers do not advance past the NLCS, so I'm cheering on the Brewers as I hope their National League-leading best record translates into them beating the Dodgers —who had the second-best winning percentage—in this upcoming series just as the Rays took care of the Yankees. The energy in New York Ci...

I have a shorter post for this week as I had lots going on with friends in town for the recent run of Phish shows at Madison Square Garden and as I write this I am also packing for my first ever trip to Cleveland. The Arizona Diamondbacks are playing a three game set  at Progressive Field and I hope  to catch the first two games of the series. The inspiration for this week's post however has nothing to do with Cleveland or the Diamondbacks but rather National Pinball Day which is celebrated on August 1 as that is the birthday of pinball visionary, Roger Sharpe. The hat I've chosen to celebrate Sharpe is a Kannapolis Cannon Ballers hat because the cap design makes me think of a pinball in flight! I picked this cap up in 2022 so I imagine the sweatband tags should align with other caps from that year. After celebrating the Knicks and MSG with blue and orange last week, I'm back on my ususal program of paying homage to the US with a red, white and blue cap this week. I am look...

I'm switching things up in a major way this week as this 2018 Brooklyn Nets "City Edition" cap marks the first time this blog's ever featured an NBA team and the reason being May 21 is Notorious B.I.G. Day in Brooklyn  and Biggie's affinity for Coogi sweaters is what inspires this design. The Coogi pattern on the bill here makes this cap a must have for any fan of hip-hop, even (self-hating) Knicks fans such as myself :::ducks::: Spreading Coogi love all the way to the sweatband. Thats the Brooklyn way. The silhouette on the NBA logo doesn't have a cool name like "MLB Batterman" and until the design switches to Kobe Bryant, which his hopefully one day soon, I think that's fine. The backstory on the silhouette is actually more interesting than the logo itself so if you want to read more on that, here's a great write-up from 2017 by The Undefeated . This week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is not going on the  Trading Block  however please...