Baseball Hats

Baseball Caps

The baseball cap was first invented to protect the player’s eyes from the sun over the baseball diamond. Without the visor in front, it was likely that a player could accidentally look into the sun while searching for a fly ball and suffer serious eye damage, if not go blind. In a more pragmatic aspect, it also made it easier for players to see where the ball was headed with a visor blocking the glare. The first team to wear baseball caps was the long-defunct Brooklyn Excelsiors, who started to wear a rounded-top, visored cap in 1860. The cap was successful, however the so-called “Brooklyn Style” didn’t become widespread until forty years later, after the Excelsiors themselves had faded into obscurity. Today it is the most popular style of hat in the United States, Japan, Canada and many other western countries.

Vintage Baseball Caps

As baseball caps are often made in bulk and designed to be cheap and disposable, there are not actually very many vintage baseball caps that still exist. The original baseball caps were made almost entirely of wool, and didn’t even have any plastic in them until 1940. As such, they are quick to decompose, eaten by moths and other vermin, which was aided by their disposability. For people that wish the vintage feel, however, there are a select few online merchants that produce and sell replicas of vintage-style caps. One such place is Dugout Memories (http://www.dugout-memories.com/), which mostly offer modern-style caps with archaic logos, but also carry a fair supply of other vintage-replica paraphernalia, including jackets, posters, and baseball cards; and another is the Ebbets Field Flannels, which carries more accurate vintage era replicas of both caps and jerseys, including some authentic items.

New Era Baseball Caps

The “new era” could probably be seen as the 1940’s, when plastic stiffeners were first added to caps to help them retain their shape. Or perhaps it was when the caps first started to be made out of polyester instead of wool. But, whatever it is, there isn’t a lot of diversity in the current baseball cap market. They’re all composed of triangular fabric sections sewn together in a dome shape with a bill and a logo at the front, a size adjustor at the back and a button at the top. They can be found seemingly anywhere a human being has been, and if you don’t know where to get one, you are not alive.