Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

My pre-jitters of the pre-season have subsided with the first game of the 2025 Spring Training is in the books as the  Chicago Cubs beat the Los Angeles Dodgers to the score of 12-4. I look forward to more Dodgers losses as well as the first San Francisco Giants win that I hope comes in their first Spring Training game of the year which is this Saturday against the Texas Rangers. The Giants made some respectable off-season moves but thankfully nothing so crazy where my expectations are too outsized. While I'm neither a Yankees nor Mets fan, as a New Yorker I have to say things are always better when our teams play well, which unfortunately neither did against the Dodgers in last year's postseason. Now is not the time to hark back to the past though as the best recovery from the Yankees Game 5 embarrassment in the 2024 World Series is to win their Spring Training opener against the Tampa Bay Rays today. I would like to see them ride that energy all the way to another ...

After spending dozen years writing entries in this blog there are not many "firsts" that come along so when I realized that I had not yet done a proper Valentine's Day post for Fresh Fitted Friday , I knew right away that I should bring out the Inland Empire 66ers of San Bernardino "Cherubs" by the inimitable DJ Mach at the flagship New Era store in Buffalo, NY. The metallic threading here is the most recognizable difference between the 66ers "Cherub" cap design and the Buffalo-exclusive that I'm featuring today. I love how it makes the Tiffany—or Tuscan, depending on your preference of terms—font pop here. The team issued "Cherub" also lacks the side-stitched arrows DJ Mach included which is much appreciated as they are synonymous with Cupid in classical mythology.  The "Genuine Merchandise" tag is something that I started seeing on MILB caps that I've purchased over the last few years, most notably starting with the 1982 D...

The big news around baseball this week was the New York Mets reuniting with their superstar first baseman Pete Alonso on a two-year deal worth $54M.  While the $10M signing bonus is an unfathomable sum for most folks to comprehend, Alonso could have net even more had he not turned down the $158 seven year deal the Mets offered in June 2023. I should note that I find pocket-watching tacky and my approach to the game is based in emotion rather than a place based in accounting! In any case, it is fun for fans to goad the ownership of their beloved teams to pay "whatever it takes" to bring back beloved players like Alonso, especially after giving out a massive payday to Juan Soto  this offseason. As a San Francisco Giants fan, I am pleased with the free agent signings of Willy Adames and Justin Verlander but cannot avoid being annoyed by the  Los Angeles Dodgers even busier offseason as well as in recent years where they've managed to rope in Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman an...

I clung to a faint hope that posting a Buffalo-exclusive from New Era’s flagship in last week's post ahead of the AFC Championship game might bring good luck to the Buffalo Bills against the Kansas City Chiefs.  Unfortunately, my celebratory run of sharing Buffalo-related caps will have to wait for another time. And just like this year’s remaining unsigned MLB free agents who are frustrated with their previous and prospective teams alike, I had to find an alternative route for this week’s post. The main difference between me and players like Pete Alonso or Alex Bregman is that I don’t anticipate receiving a lucrative contract between now and the start of Spring Training. Nevertheless, that mere fact won’t deter me from daydreaming about the sun-soaked games that are about to unfold in Arizona and   Florida in particular as I’ve chosen to focus on the Kissimmee Cobras for this week’s post. In addition to celebrating the “Year of the Snake” during the current Lunar New Yea...

I have been saving this 1994 Appleton Foxes retro on deck for a long while in anticipation of Ichiro Suzuki's inevitable inclusion in the 2025 Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) Hall of Fame announcement which occurred earlier this week. That bit of good news was certainly a welcome reprieve from the grief brought on by the passing of Bob Uecker. And even though Suzuki never had a single at-bat in the minor leagues, I chose this cap worn by the former Seattle Mariners affiliate in the Midwest League because it represents the big league club's Tealism years, which comprise the era many of us associate with him. The only year the Foxes featured the Mariners colorway in their caps and uniforms was 1994 however this retro has a colorflip effect by featuring a metallic silver fill on the logo lettering rather than teal which you can see in the last photo at the bottom. The shine of the metallic silver here seems like a lot to handle but I am interested in seeing h...

My plan for this week’s post was to feature a whimsical cap for National Popeye Day, but just now learning about Bob Uecker’s passing makes it strange to have any inspiration other than the longtime Milwaukee Brewers radio legend. Uecker and I shared a birthday—which if you are keeping track, is 9 days from today—and as crazy timing would have it, he turned 45 the day I was born, which is my current age now! The main hinderance in my Brewers-themed tribute to Uecker is that I already wrote about my two newest Brewers hats in 2024! While I doubt he saw those posts, I’m glad I shared them while he was still alive. I’m also happy to shift the focus to Cleveland, because for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, our introduction to Uecker was the 1989 movie, Major League. I quite liked the 2014-21 cap logo but this one is a bit more distinctive and its uniqueness appeals to me a bit more. The side patch featuring the "G-wing baseball" design that the team uses for its primary log...