The Ballcap Blog

Note: Somehow the text color is messed up; I will try to fix it at some point. Once upon a time, New Era Cap Company was synonymous with American manufacturing. However, slowly since the 1990s, New Era's American manufacturing began to slowly disappear piece by piece. How did this happen? How did we get here? The First Step Let's go back to the early 90s. New Era's then-biggest competitor in headwear was Sports Specialties, a company driven by the business savvy of David Warsaw, the man who invented modern sports licensing. Sports Specialties had entered the headwear fray in 1983 and became a powerful force on a very short period of time. Instead of using American manufacturing (which was still common at the time for headwear), they went with a South Korean-based company called "YoungAn Hat Co.", who had their name behind the Sports Specialties label. YoungAn was a South Korean-based private label manufacturer. Soon, big brands at the time such as Starter and the...

 Long time no post! I've had way too much going on. Anyway, today I'd like to talk about caps in recent history that were announced and even made, but never actually made it onto the field. MLB First, we have a Chicago Cubs St. Patrick's Day cap from the 2010s (the "Fly Your Own Flag" label was used from 2012 to early 2016). I followed the Cubs closely during this period and as far as I knew, the Cubs wore Velcro-back 3930s for St. Patrick's Day during that era. I own one such game worn example. Several of these surfaced on eBay through discount clothing sellers and did not appear to be available anywhere else. They were made in China. Next, we have another St. Patrick's Day cap. This is the replacement 2020 San Diego Padres St. Patrick's Day. As I'm sure many of you remember, the 2020 San Diego Padres Spring training/batting practice caps were yanked from the shelves and online retailers after it was pointed out that the way the inner logo was cro...