Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

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

At this point I must admit that last week's call for black magick was useless. Since there's no point in summoning sorcery for this week, I'm just praying the Giants don't get swept by the Padres this weekend and ending the season with 100 losses. Since I'm tuning in to that series while in Atlanta, this week's Fresh Fitted Friday selection is a Greenville Braves cap. Bonus points for this week's photos at a Pearle Vision in Roswell, GA. And extra bonus points for the 70's interior.  While the  sweatband tags and  satin taping style are consistent with caps I've featured from the mid 1990's, this cap is most likely not from any time before 1999 which is when the New Era flag began to appear on minor league caps. This Joe Nelson card from 1999 is the oldest Greenville Braves card I could find with a player in a cap sporting the New Era flag. Image courtesy of COMC This cap logo is a reminder of how dominant the Atl

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%

Alright folks, I admit last week's cap was not very tantalizing but if every week's post features an exciting hat then what is an exciting hat? Ok well, maybe you just have high standards for this site so I should just shut up and deliver this ultra-rare treat: a super vintage Fort Lauderdale Yankees cap. A lot has happened in this past week's news cycle but let's not soon forget the devastation that  Hurricane Irma wreaked in the Caribbean as well as many parts of Florida, including Fort Lauderdale. For Tampa, it meant the Rays were not be able to play a home series against the Yankees so that series ended up getting played at CitiField in New York.  It was a rare treat to see the Yankees play somewhere other than Yankee Stadium so I wore my Fort Lauderdale Yankees  (rather than a Tampa Yankees)   hat to honor the occasion as well as to show solidarity with my Floridian friends. I suppose I've always associated Fort Lauderdale with pinstripes because

Welcome back to your regularly scheduled missives of a baseball milquetoast! The last few weeks of summer have been hectic for me but I'm ready for fall even if at this very moment my beloved San Francisco Giants are two games away from being eliminated from a wild card berth. But you know who's in the running for one of those berths in the AL? The Minnesota Twins! I've written about some Twins farm teams on here but never the big club. I figure now is as good a time to do that as any since they're currently playing decent baseball which is something they haven't done since 2010. That's not a fact but the way; it's just an opinion I came up with by looking at their record over the last few years! Coupling that opinion with the 3 World Series the Giants have won since 2010 is comforting but  let's get back to this cap because it intrigues me. The tags and satin taping are consistent with what I've seen on caps from 2002-2004 however I ha

No post this week but (I think) I'll be back in action next week. Cheers!

This week's Fresh Fitted is another one from The Great eBay Haul but this one is different in that it's not too small for me to wear. It is, however, too  big  by a size or two but the fact I red hats aren't my jam means that I'll probably end up trading it for something I'd actually wear. If not, it would be nice to have a vintage cap like this one around for research. I've mentioned before how in addition to staying away from red caps, I have a general rule against wearing MLB caps in NYC, other than of course rocking a Yankees hat to Yankee Stadium. I think I avoid MLB caps because I don't want to mislead tourists from that team's city into thinking they can ask me for directions. I'm a bad person. Assigning a specific year to this cap might seem like a hard row to hoe but it really isn't. The sweatband tags could be from anywhere between 2001 to 2004 but I'm going to guess this cap is from either 2001 or 2002 based on