Ball Cap Nation. Jim Lilliefors
standardized look of the “baseball cap” was not realized until about 1900. Early sports catalogues show a variety of hats under the broad heading “base ball caps.” An ad from an 1888 Spalding catalogue, for instance, includes ten different styles, including hats that could be described as a beanie, a conductor’s cap, a derby, a jockey’s hat, and what appears to be a layer cake with a visor. Standardizing the uniform became a way of standardizing the game. By the turn of the century, the pillbox-style cap was on its way out, and an ancestor of the current-day ball cap was in widespread use.
Stitched Visor
In 1903, Spalding introduced the Philadelphia-style cap, which was the first to feature a stitched visor. The stitching attached the fabric of the bill to the cardboard insert. This soon became a regular part of the ball cap.
Six Panels
In many early ball caps, the crown was made of eight separate panels. The six-panel cap became more common in the late 1880s, although it wasn’t standard until well into the twentieth century.
Longer bills
The bill gradually became longer in the 1920s and 1930s, providing a more pronounced shading effect (all baseball games were played during the day until 1935). The visor also became firmer, changing from cardboard to latex rubber, which was in general use by the 1940s.
Vertical Crowns
In the late 1940s, the crown of the baseball cap became more vertical. A weave of cotton fibers called buckram became the stiffening agent used to reinforce the front crown panels and is still a part of MLB caps. The vertical crown made the team logo more prominent and also gave the cap a more aesthetically pleasing look.
Polyester
Caps were made out of wool for most of the history of Major League Baseball. But other materials changed. The leather sweatband, for instance, became cotton in the 1920s. The most recent change to the Major League baseball cap came in 2007, when the standard cap changed from wool to a polyester fabric. The change was made to better manage sweat, reduce shrinking, and reduce odor. The new cap was designed to “wick” sweat—spread it across the fabric, then absorb and evaporate it. The new caps retail for thirty-two dollars, three dollars more than the old ones.
EXPORTING BASEBALL
America’s version of baseball, invented in the 1800s, soon spread to other countries, carrying with it some elements of the American spirit and, yes, the American baseball uniform. Baseball was introduced to Cuba, for instance, in the 1860s by Cuban students studying in the United States. It became popular in other Caribbean-region and Latin American countries, including the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. It is played professionally in all of these countries today.
Baseball and its cap were introduced to Japan in the early 1870s by an American teacher, Horace Wilson. The country’s professional baseball league was launched in 1920. Over the past fifty years, baseball has been Japan’s most popular spectator sport.
BEFORE PEOPLE THOUGHT THAT WAY
“We shouldn’t say baseball invented this cap, but I think it would be fair to say that baseball solidified its place in our culture.”
– Tom Shieber, Senior Curator, National Baseball Hall of Fame
Beneath the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is a treasure trove of memorabilia—storage vaults and rows of shelves containing tens of thousands of artifacts, including caps, uniforms, bats, gloves, and balls. There are several aisles filled with boxes of old Major League game-worn baseball caps, some of them dating to the nineteenth century. Tom Shieber, the Hall of Fame’s senior curator, leads a private tour of this remarkable subterranean baseball museum.
Shieber, an expert on the history of baseball uniforms, has created an online exhibition called “Dressed to the Nines,” which traces the year-by-year development of the baseball uniform. Most of it is based on hours spent poring through old ads from Spalding catalogues and other sports publications.
Normally, when an item comes to the Hall of Fame, there is little accompanying information; it is the job of Shieber and the curatorial staff to determine what role, if any, the artifact played in the history of baseball.
“Our job really is to tell stories,” he says. “There’s a story to everything here. But it often takes a lot of research to put those stories together.”
Wearing white gloves, he displays one of the gems of this storage area: the Hall of Fame’s oldest New York Yankees cap, dating from 1912. Technically, it isn’t really a Yankees cap, it’s a Highlanders cap. The team wasn’t officially named the Yankees until 1913, even though fans called them that for several years. The logo on this cap is similar to that on the current Yankees cap; but this cap has a looser crown and a shorter brim.
Baseball Hall of Fame Senior Curator Tom Shieber with boxes of game-worn MLB caps, in the storage vault below the Hall of Fame.
It was donated to the Hall of Fame in 1990, Shieber says, by a little-known former Highlander player named Paul Otis. Several months after donating the cap, Otis passed away. His signature, “P. Otis,” can be seen on the cap’s sweat band; but Shieber determined that Otis had probably signed the cap right before giving it to the Hall of Fame. As he inspected the cap further, he noticed that another name was also written in the band: “Dolan.”
“This cap does match the 1912 cap. I looked up Paul Otis’ record and the times he played. What I found was that he was with the team very briefly. Literally for only five games. Then I found out that Cozy Dolan also played with them in 1912. What happened was Dolan played with them early in the season, and they brought Otis out of the minors later on and gave him the cap.”
Neither player is recognized today, but there is an interesting history to this cap, Shieber says. “The Yankees played in a benefit game right after the Titanic sank (on April 14, 1912). Dolan was there for that game, sitting on the bench. And I also found out that Dolan was in the lineup for the first game at Fenway Park, on April 20, 1912. So he almost certainly wore this cap during the first game ever played at Fenway Park.”
Shieber, who worked as an astrophysicist for UCLA’s astronomy department for a dozen years before joining the Hall of Fame ten years ago, shared some of his thoughts about the evolution of the baseball cap:
BCN: Where did what we now call the baseball cap come from?
TS: What we can say is that the baseball cap developed over a period of time and that it came from different sources. The first hats were straw, but baseball was a different game then. Baseball started out as a club sport, as a social get-together, a fraternal group. The earliest baseball uniform was more a club uniform than a sports uniform. As the game changed, the cap took on more functional purposes—it shielded the eyes, and it also identified the teams—but there were many different styles. We do know that when the National League started, in 1876, and into the 1880s, the pillbox style was the most popular.
BCN: That’s the cap that the Pirates brought back for the 1976 centennial of baseball?
TS: Yes. Actually, what happened was in 1976 a number of National League teams, not all, wore an imitation of the pillbox-style cap to celebrate the anniversary. The teams all went back to their regular caps the next year. The Pirates didn’t get the message. They continued to wear it for several years and actually won a World Series wearing it in 1979.
BCN: Why did the pillbox-style ball cap fade away?
TS: There are functional reasons and there are fashion reasons. Exactly why some of these styles went out of fashion is unclear. Sometimes there are obvious influences that cause a change in what teams wear. When the University of Michigan basketball team started wearing the baggy uniforms, it caught on, it went up to the pros and that’s the standard today. With the baseball uniform, it has tended to be more subtle and more gradual. Often if a certain player or a winning team does something that’s a little different, it catches on.
BCN: