The Ballcap Blog

A couple of weeks ago, I got a message from a friend and fellow collector saying that he had found an odd Padres cap that he had never seen before. This is the cap. The caps with this style had come from a long-gone sporting goods store in Buffalo, NY (coincidentally, the home of New Era) and the elderly woman that co-owned the store sold off the deadstock that had been sitting around to someone else, who then sold some of it to my friend. Immediately we believed that this cap was made to go with the recently unveiled 1985 Padres prototype jersey, which is owned by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and was displayed at the 2016 MLB All-Star Game FanFest in San Diego. Looks like a match, right? Turns out to be not so. I reached out to some folks in the know via Twitter, and one person that had seen the original 1985 prototype designs said " Totally different-cap that went with the Fanfest jersey was brown with a yellow interlocking italic "SD". So there yo...

A h, the leather sweatband.  A controversial topic for us baseball cap enthusiasts. Preferred by the traditionalist but derided by the casual wearer. Over the course of the last twenty-five years, leather sweatbands in baseball caps have become a rarity and have all but disappeared. However, there are still a few places were leather sweatbands can be found today. One place where leather sweatbands can still be found is on the field of Major League Baseball. No way! Really? Yes, it's true. MLB umpires can still get leather sweatbands on their caps. Although leather sweatbands on MLB and MiLB players caps were last seen in 1988 (with some caps possibly lingering into 1989), they have continued to be seen inside non-retail versions of umpire caps. The leather style has also changed. The sweatbands had been the exact same kind seen inside of on-field caps since the 70s, but by the early 2000s the leather began being covered by some sort of paint or stain. At some point betwe...

It has been well documented that many teams wore "pillbox caps" at some point during the 1976 season and the Pittsburgh Pirates ended up wearing them for ten seasons after that point. Aside from the teams we know that wore them for sure (Pirates, Mets, Cardinals, & Phillies, then possibly Expos and Yankees) there were other teams that no one knows for sure if the team wore them or not: White Sox, Red Sox, Cubs, Padres, & Giants. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the cap is game worn or team issued when they show up online somewhere. Sports Specialties made pillbox snapback fan caps available for all teams during the 80s, so you could imagine what it would have been like if your favorite team opted to wear them. New Era even made fitted cap versions of all teams as well (from what I can tell). Now, the Giants pillbox that I had seen in an eBay auction a few years back used the 1977 to 1982 logo. However, I had heard that the Giants had supposedly worn them in 1976, ...

The coming 2016 baseball season marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most notorious teams in all of professional baseball, not to mention my hometown team the year of my birth; the 1986 San Jose "Bad News" Bees. The Bees were one of the last independent teams in minor league baseball, but did have a partnership with the Seibu Lions of Japan. As the second incarnation of the Bees (the original Bees existed from 1962 to 1976), the team existed from 1983 to 1987. The franchise failed to be profitable and op erated on a shoe-string budget. Aside from several young Japanese players, the rest of the players were disgraced former major leaguers, the majority of which were blacklisted from the big leagues for substance abuse. During the season, many players lived in nearby flophouses and even on mattresses inside stadium's clubhouse. Known as the "Rebels Cave", it featured a refrigerator, beer signs, broken bleacher seats for guests, and a painting made by one of t...

For the vast majority of the history of baseball, most teams wore just one type of cap per season. In the mid-19th century, "Road/Away" game caps began to appear. Then "alternate' caps and "spring training/batting practice" caps. In the 90s came patches on the caps of players in the All-Star game and on the caps of teams in the World Series, which gave birth to patches on caps for the post-season in general. Since then, we've seen patches on caps for multiple reasons, most notably retiring Yankees players and an American flag patch on 9/11.  1995 Atlanta Braves cap with World Series patch. In the last decade we've begun to see "theme" caps. Caps that may differ in design and/or color from the regular on-field cap for a specific team. Most prominently is the "Stars and Stripes" collection worn on the 4th of July and camouflage caps worn on Memorial Day. Teams have also done green caps environmental causes and pink caps ...

Long before the city of Santa Clara, California was home to Levi's Stadium and the San Francisco 49ers of the NFL, the city's only other professional sports team in modern history was the Santa Clara Padres, a co-op team in the single-A California League. Their lone season was in 1979, where they were supposed to play their home games at Washington Park, a WPA project which was built in 1935 and featured a wooden 1,000-seat grandstand. However, minor league baseball was unsatisfied with the small park and so the Padres played many home games at nearby San Jose Municipal Stadium instead, which they had to share with then-Mariners affiliate the San Jose Missions. The Santa Clara Padres featured players from the Mariners, A's, Angels, Padres, and Cardinals organizations.Three future major leaguers played for the team; John Hobbs, Ron Tingley, and the one-and-only Joe Maddon, who caught 60 games behind the plate. Santa Clara Padres Cap: Gold logo identical to the...

Ebbets Field Flannels now has the Kansas City Katz cap available for pre-order via their website HERE !!! As you can see, the logo looks 100% identical to the original cap. They did a fantastic job. I visited the Ebbets Field Flannels store/factory in Seattle on Monday, August 10th and got a tour of the place from owner Jerry Cohen. He's a great guy. Order your Katz cap today! P.S. I still plan on posting more on the blog but life keeps getting in the way. Please be patient and I'll get more stuff going eventually!