The 1903 World Series was the first of baseball’s modern era. Boston and Pittsburgh were adhering to newly codified rules of play — and also initiating a new code of dress, as no one could have known, least of all the men in the stands, uniformly obedient to the laws of Edwardian haberdashery. The spectators wore “derbies, boaters, checkered caps and porkpie hats,” wrote Beverly Chico in her book, “Hats and Headwear Around the World.” Each style signaled a distinct social identity. All are now regarded largely as museum pieces, having fallen away in favor of a hat that offers casual comfort and a comforting image of classlessness. Given our cult of youth, our populist preference for informality and our native inclination toward sportiness, its emergence as the common man’s crown was inevitable.
Frank Sinatra supposedly implored the fedora-wearers of his era to cock their brims: Angles are attitudes. Ballplayers have accepted this as truth since at least that first World Series, when Fred Clarke, Pittsburgh’s left fielder and manager, wore his visor insouciantly askew, and the general public has come to know the ground rules as well. Here’s a test of fluency in the sartorial vernacular of Americans: You can read the tilt of a bill like the cut of a jib. The way you wear your hat is essential to others’ memories of you, and the look of a ball cap’s brim communicates tribal identity more meaningfully than the symbols stitched across its front. Is the bill flatter than an AstroTurf outfield? Curved like the trajectory of a fly ball? Straightforwardly centered? Reversed like that of a catcher in his crouch or a loiterer on his corner? The cap conforms to most any cast of mind.
Watch people fiddling with their baseball caps as they sit at a stoplight or on a bar stool, primping and preening in what must be the most socially acceptable form of self-grooming. No one begrudges their fussiness, because everyone appreciates the attempt to express a point of view. The cap presents studies of plasticity in action and of the individual effort to stake out a singular place on the roster, and the meaning of the logo is as mutable as any other aspect. To wear a New York Yankees cap in the United States is to show support for the team, maybe, or to invest in the hegemony of an imperial city. To wear one abroad — the Yankees model is by far the best-selling Major League Baseball cap in Europe and Asia — is to invest in an idealized America, a phenomenon not unlike pulling on contraband bluejeans in the old Soviet Union. (...)
“Until the late 1970s, wearing a ball cap anywhere but on the baseball field carried with it a cultural stigma,” James Lilliefors writes in his book “Ball Cap Nation,” citing the Mets cap of the “Odd Couple” slob Oscar Madison as one example of its signaling mundane degeneracy. In Lilliefors’s reckoning, eight factors contributed to the cap’s increased legitimacy, including the explosion of television sports, the maturation of the first generation of Little League retirees and the relative suavity of the Detroit Tigers cap worn by Tom Selleck as the title character of “Magnum P.I.”: “It made sporting a ball cap seem cool rather than quirky; and it created an interest in authentic M.L.B. caps.” What had been merely juvenile came to seem attractively boyish, and New Era was poised to reap the rewards, having begun selling its wares to the general public, by way of a mail-order ad in the Sporting News, in 1979. (...)
Where the basic structure of a derby or a boater spoke of the wearer’s rank and region, the baseball cap is comparatively subtle. Angles are indeed accents, and a millimetric bend in the bill will inflect the article’s voice. The hip-hop habit is to wear the cap perfectly fresh and clean, as if it arrived on the head directly from the cash register, spotless except, perhaps, for the circle of the manufacturer’s label still stuck to it, alerting admirers that this is no counterfeit and that the cap is as new as the money that bought it. In tribute to this practice, New Era not long ago issued a limited-edition series of caps in the colors of its sticker, black and gold, as if the company were at once flattering its customers and further transforming them into advertisements for itself.
Peel the sticker away and bow the brim a bit: This is the simple start of asserting a further level of ownership. Taken to an extreme, the process can resemble a burlesque of the ancient ritual of breaking in the baseball mitts with which the cap’s contours rhyme. To speak to an undergraduate about a “dirty white baseball cap” is to evoke a fratboy lifestyle devoted to jam bands and domestic lager and possibly lacrosse. To spend time among the frat boys themselves is to learn the baroque techniques for accelerating wear and tear. Some wear them in the shower; others yet undertake artificial rituals involving the hair dryer and the dishwasher and the kitchen sink, recalling the collegians of midcentury who, expressing the prep fetish for the shabby genteel, took sandpaper to the collars of their Oxford shirts to gain a frayed edge.
Frank Sinatra supposedly implored the fedora-wearers of his era to cock their brims: Angles are attitudes. Ballplayers have accepted this as truth since at least that first World Series, when Fred Clarke, Pittsburgh’s left fielder and manager, wore his visor insouciantly askew, and the general public has come to know the ground rules as well. Here’s a test of fluency in the sartorial vernacular of Americans: You can read the tilt of a bill like the cut of a jib. The way you wear your hat is essential to others’ memories of you, and the look of a ball cap’s brim communicates tribal identity more meaningfully than the symbols stitched across its front. Is the bill flatter than an AstroTurf outfield? Curved like the trajectory of a fly ball? Straightforwardly centered? Reversed like that of a catcher in his crouch or a loiterer on his corner? The cap conforms to most any cast of mind.Watch people fiddling with their baseball caps as they sit at a stoplight or on a bar stool, primping and preening in what must be the most socially acceptable form of self-grooming. No one begrudges their fussiness, because everyone appreciates the attempt to express a point of view. The cap presents studies of plasticity in action and of the individual effort to stake out a singular place on the roster, and the meaning of the logo is as mutable as any other aspect. To wear a New York Yankees cap in the United States is to show support for the team, maybe, or to invest in the hegemony of an imperial city. To wear one abroad — the Yankees model is by far the best-selling Major League Baseball cap in Europe and Asia — is to invest in an idealized America, a phenomenon not unlike pulling on contraband bluejeans in the old Soviet Union. (...)
“Until the late 1970s, wearing a ball cap anywhere but on the baseball field carried with it a cultural stigma,” James Lilliefors writes in his book “Ball Cap Nation,” citing the Mets cap of the “Odd Couple” slob Oscar Madison as one example of its signaling mundane degeneracy. In Lilliefors’s reckoning, eight factors contributed to the cap’s increased legitimacy, including the explosion of television sports, the maturation of the first generation of Little League retirees and the relative suavity of the Detroit Tigers cap worn by Tom Selleck as the title character of “Magnum P.I.”: “It made sporting a ball cap seem cool rather than quirky; and it created an interest in authentic M.L.B. caps.” What had been merely juvenile came to seem attractively boyish, and New Era was poised to reap the rewards, having begun selling its wares to the general public, by way of a mail-order ad in the Sporting News, in 1979. (...)
Where the basic structure of a derby or a boater spoke of the wearer’s rank and region, the baseball cap is comparatively subtle. Angles are indeed accents, and a millimetric bend in the bill will inflect the article’s voice. The hip-hop habit is to wear the cap perfectly fresh and clean, as if it arrived on the head directly from the cash register, spotless except, perhaps, for the circle of the manufacturer’s label still stuck to it, alerting admirers that this is no counterfeit and that the cap is as new as the money that bought it. In tribute to this practice, New Era not long ago issued a limited-edition series of caps in the colors of its sticker, black and gold, as if the company were at once flattering its customers and further transforming them into advertisements for itself.
Peel the sticker away and bow the brim a bit: This is the simple start of asserting a further level of ownership. Taken to an extreme, the process can resemble a burlesque of the ancient ritual of breaking in the baseball mitts with which the cap’s contours rhyme. To speak to an undergraduate about a “dirty white baseball cap” is to evoke a fratboy lifestyle devoted to jam bands and domestic lager and possibly lacrosse. To spend time among the frat boys themselves is to learn the baroque techniques for accelerating wear and tear. Some wear them in the shower; others yet undertake artificial rituals involving the hair dryer and the dishwasher and the kitchen sink, recalling the collegians of midcentury who, expressing the prep fetish for the shabby genteel, took sandpaper to the collars of their Oxford shirts to gain a frayed edge.
by Troy Patterson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mauricio Alejo
