Iconic baseball caps: Boston Red Sox

The Boston Red Sox were eliminated from the American League playoffs today by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, as good an occasion as any to honor the Red Sox cap for its iconic status.

I’ve had occasional flirtations with the BoSox but mostly an uneasy relationship over the years. My first youth baseball team was the Red Sox, and for a while I tried emulating the high-elbow batting stance of Carl Yaztremski (inset). A lot of good that did me.

I saw quite a few games involving the Red Sox and Indians at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in the 1960s. At one, I sat next to a kid a year or two younger than I who said he was a cousin of Rico Petrocelli. He had a notebook with pages full of Rico’s autograph. (Did he offer me one? No — my first lesson in the social charms of New Englanders.)

When I went off to college in New England, I encountered gale-force Red Sox boosterism from the overwhelming majority of my classmates. It was tough being an Indians fan in that environment, and over the four years of my undergraduate studies I eventually talked myself into rooting for the Red Sox as a second-level affiliation.

When I moved to Milwaukee for graduate school, one of the first things I did in my free time was head to County Stadium to see the Brewers play the Red Sox. The ratio of Brewers-to-Sox fans that evening was about 39,000-to-1, and I kept my mouth shut. Fact is, I couldn’t cut it as a Red Sox fan. For one thing, my Great Lakes accent was pretty much an instant barrier into my stepping out onto Yawkey Way. And my heart wasn’t in it.

Nonetheless, I did cheer raucously when the Sox finally broke their streak and won the World Series a couple of years ago. And I must acknowledge the power of the Red Sox cap. It’s been around seemingly forever, or at least since 1933 according to the Dressed to the Nines baseball uniform database. That Red “B” — as in Beaneaters — against the blue field is a classic. It’s no wonder a newspaper publisher friend and Red Sox diehard wears one everywhere he goes.

So long, St. Louis Cardinals

That didn’t take long. The Los Angeles Dodgers made short work of the Cardinals in the National League Division Series, closing out the sweep this evening 5-1 in St. Louis. The Cardinals and their fans are thus stuck with this National League Central cap to mark their achievements this season.

My fingers want to type “There’s no shame in going to the playoffs and getting swept in the opening round.” But that’s not what I believe.

Getting swept is a humiliating experience in baseball — and there a many equivalents to it in real life. In the NFL, it stings to lose in the first round of the playoffs but not as badly as it does in Major League Baseball. Three and out — ouch.

It hurts even worse if you had one of the games seemingly within reach, only to bobble it as badly as the Cardinals did in the ninth inning of the second game.

If the Cardinals had squeaked into the playoffs as a wild-card team, it might not hurt so bad. But they cruised to their division title. They and their fans expected much more.

It will be a long, cold winter in St. Louis.

Iconic baseball caps: The Los Angeles Dodgers

The Los Angeles Dodgers cap is one of the best in baseball.

With their blade-straight serifs against the deep blue fabric, the white “L” and “A” form one of the most instantly recognizable logos in sport.

Look at this book cover photo of Sandy Koufax at left. (What a great portrait!) Even the most hardened Dodger hater has to admit: the cap is classy.

As a blue-eyed kid in Cleveland reading about Koufax, Don Drysdale and the rest of the Dodgers way out west, I fantasized every now and then about wearing Dodger blue. As an adult who’s spent most of the past two decades close to Candlestick and AT&T parks, I can’t bring myself to wear it now.

Alliances notwithstanding, I have to say the Dodger cap is one of the most aesthetically pleasing caps of all time.

Caps off to The Captain, Derek Jeter, on tying Lou Gehrig’s hit mark

Jeter and Gehrig, the spirit of the Yankees

It took me a while to appreciate the greatness of Derek Jeter, who tonight in New York tied Lou Gehrig for a record 2,721 hits in a Yankees’ uniform. He’ll undoubtedly break the record in the next few games, and I hope he keeps on swinging until he reaches 3,000 hits.

For most of my life, the Yankees were the enemy, bullies in high-priced pinstripes beating up on teams from the small markets where I happened to live – Cleveland, Seattle, Oakland. They even tormented me in Omaha, where the Kansas City Royals have kept their Class A farm club for many years.

From the hinterlands I had caught Jeter on TV, and he was no doubt a quality ballplayer. But I didn’t watch him regularly. Then I transferred to Midtown Manahttan and lived nearby. Slowly, inevitably, I was drawn in by the Yankees’ tractor beam pulsing from the South Bronx. At first, Paul O’Neill was my favorite Yankee, and when he moved on I got behind Jorge Posada.

Over the years, I started noticing Jeter more and more. I managed to miss the spectacular play he made along the first base line in a 2001 playoff game against Oakland, impossibly intercepting an errant outfield throw and flinging the ball to Posada at the plate to cut down Jeremy Giambi. But there was a night a year or two later when the Yankees were playing the Red Sox. Jeter went tearing after a pop foul and speared it as he tumbled into the first row of seats. Watching the game in our basement family room, my younger son and I looked at each other wide-eyed, knowing we’d just seen something exceptional.

In career of exceptional achievement, Jeter is having one of his best years in 2009. Hats off the Yankee captain, who is worthy of the accolades and superlatives accorded him.

Rowdy girl cap in Japan

Now here’s a ball cap. The photo, which I spotted on Yahoo this evening, is an AP picture of a spectator at the Asakusa Samba carnival in Tokyo a couple of weekends ago. In only the vaguest of ways does this photo remind me of the classic National Geographic cover photo of the “Afghan girl” with the haunting hazel eyes.

Ichiro gets his 2,000th MLB hit

A tip of the cap and a deep bow to the honorable Ichiro Suzuki, who struck his 2,000th major-league hit this afternoon in Oakland. Those hits came after the 1,278 hits he had playing in Japan before crossing the Pacific to play for the Mariners.

Ichiro’s accomplishments are remarkable. Statistically, he’s one of the greatest hitters ever. Even more, he fully opened up the game to players from Asia. Yes, there had been Japanese players before him, but Ichiro has proven irrefutably that a Japanese player can be a superstar in the great American pastime. The game and the world are better for it.

The Tribe’s lost season

It’s another bitter September for fans of the Cleveland Indians. Not only is the team in the tank, but about the only star to remain after the summer fire sale — Grady Sizemore — is done for the year. Sizemore will undergo two surgeries, one on his left elbow and another on his midsection.

In tribute to another year of futility, I present above a Cleveland cap from the Cooperstown Collection. The cap, which belongs to my son-in-law, is replica of what the team wore in 1918. The Indians finished second to Boston in the American League. Two years later, they would win the pennant and one of only two world championships in franchise history.

Here’s hoping a title lies in wait for the Tribe in the next year or two. But don’t bet on it.

A new, more modest era for ball caps

The New York Times reports today on the state of the baseball cap industry, and it is certainly not immune to the recession. Sales are off 10 percent over last year at New Era, one of the industry leaders.

“We’re seeing a very jittery landscape,” the company president tells the Times. “People are trying to stick to their most conservative plans. Even Yankee hats are down despite the year they are having.”

The All-American baseball cap, by way of China

This is 2009, and Google pretty much rules the world. For no particular reason, tonight I typed “baseball caps” into the Google Images search bar to see what would come up first.

And here it is, at right: the “6 Panels Baseball Cap with Brass Buckle” as displayed on made-in-china.com.

The irony cannot be escaped. The first image for the All-American baseball cap is a generic black hat on a Web site in China where, for all I know, the people are banned from viewing my blog (poor comrades!).

I did a quick check of several of the caps in my closet, and at least half were made in China. Of the Major League Baseball caps I checked, the Giants, Cubs and Nationals all said “made in China.” My Phillies and Mariners caps are from Macau, and the Marlins lid is from Bangladesh. I couldn’t determine the origin of my Brewers lid, which is from New Era.

I’ve come to two conclusions. The Chinese must love our national pastime, if only for economic reasons. And I need to find a few more caps from the American League.

Popular: Baseball caps are all about popular

I spent the day with my son and two of his friends at the Great America theme park in Santa Clara, Calif. While I joined the guys for several rides, I sat a few out and amused myself by taking inventory of the baseball caps people in the crowd were sporting.

As the San Francisco “Don’t Even Think About Moving Here, Athletics” Giants will unequivocally tell you, Santa Clara County is Giants’ territory. So it wasn’t a surprise that I spotted more orange and black caps than any other.  But it was nothing close to even 10 percent of all the caps on display.

The cap that most got my attention was a green Giants cap not unlike the one depicted, only the crown was spangled with glitter and the word “FRISCO” was emblazoned across the back. If San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen weren’t already dead, this cap surely would have killed him.

There were other colorful variations on Major League Baseball caps, such as a red, white and navy Oakland A’s lid on a guy ahead of me in a roller coaster queue. Another guy had a Yankees cap the color of lima beans with white piping (which actually was kind of cool).

I didn’t count, but the team most represented after the Giants and A’s was the Pittsburgh Pirates. The yellow-on-black “P” cap seems to resonate with young men.

After that, it was a mish-mosh of sox (Red and White), Yankees, Phillies, Nationals, even a Tampa Bay Rays cap. One Cubs cap, too, come to think of it.

Refreshingly, I didn’t see a single Dodgers cap all day.