The Ballcap Blog

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!

The Katz cap mentioned in the post below will be reproduced by Ebbets Field Flannels. I had sent the cap along with others to the EFF headquarters to be documented for their archives. This was confirmed by EFF via their Facebook page on July 24th. They posted a picture of my Katz cap along with the caption "Kansas City Katz amateur team cap sent to us by our good friend Paul Carr. Soon to be available from EFF!". EFF head honcho Jerry Cohen told me the caps will be available in the next couple of months with their next "rotation" of caps. Stay posted here for an update on when they'll be available as well as ebbets.com and the Ebbets Field Flannels Facebook page. I have more posts in the works!

Last year, I purchased several game used vintage caps that I believed came from minor league teams in the 1960s. I was able to correctly identify some including a Knoxville Smokies and the other a Macon Peaches. Three of the caps (including the two mentioned above) were worn by Tom Tischinski, who played in the Athletics, Reds, and Twins farm systems and spent two years in the big leagues. The 3rd cap worn by Tischinski features a goofy-looking cat face. The cat is a felt shape with chain-stitched details. I could not find any team that Tischinski played for that would have had this as their cap After hours of internet searching, I was able to obtain Tischinski's current home address. I wrote him a letter asking about the cap. Not too long after, I received a reply from Tischinski. Aside from wanting to know how I got the caps (they were on eBay), Tischinski was able to tell me about the cat cap. He saod that the cap is from 1961 when he played for the Ban Johnson Amat...

Sorry for the lack of updates, folks. At the end of August and received a promotion at work (I'm now working full-time with benefits, etc.) plus still taking night classes. This has taken up most of my time. However, I have some things that I want to post on the blog that I will do over the next couple of months or so. I will do my best to at least make monthly posts. Here are some caps that I found at the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants Fan Fests. The Oakland Athletics memorabilia sale was inside the Oakland (O.Co) Colosseum inside one of the team merch stores. Despite the fact that I got there when the gates opened, the line to the memorabilia sale quickly grew and it took me over and hour and a half  to get in. Luckily, there were plenty of caps left and employees were regularly replenishing stock. Unfortunately, all but one game used cap was left. The rest were team issued caps. Some had stickers removed, some didn't. There were various caps with patches (Jap...