Capturing the Market: Hat World and Lids
INTRODUCTION
Notes From the Far Outfield
When I was a kid, baseball caps really were baseball caps. There were no designer caps back then. No cap stores in airport terminals. Celebrities never wore ball caps. Presidential candidates? Not a chance. There was nothing cool about wearing a ball cap. Look at the newsreel footage from, say, Woodstock, in 1969—or any other big event of the time—and count the baseball caps. There weren’t any. The only place you’d see a backwards ball cap in those days was behind home plate, on the head of a catcher.
Our country was different then. If you wanted to wear a ball cap, you had to join a team and play ball. Which was, more or less, the reason I got involved in sports: I wanted to wear the uniform, to be part of the team. I still remember my first sandlot baseball cap—the bright red wool fabric, the authoritative white “M” on the crown, the taut bill that I always curved just a little extra so that it shaded my eyes.
I was, to use a slight exaggeration, an “average” ball player, with a tendency to daydream on the field. I started at shortstop, but they quickly moved me to outfield after a pop fly hit me on the foot. Actually, I was reassigned to what was known as the “far outfield,” which was sort of one position beyond the outfielders. The “far outfield” was where they put the players who were left over after the nine starting positions had been filled. Our team had about twenty-seven players in the far outfield, as I recall. Most of what we did out there was kick at the grass, adjust our caps, and think about stuff besides baseball.
On those rare occasions when a ball was hit to the far outfield, we would all look up, in various states of panic, waiting to see who would step forward to catch it. Some of the far outfielders would do a little dance-and-squint routine, pretending to be getting in position to make the catch. But no one ever did. Once the ball thunked to the ground, we would all run toward it and the one who got there first would pick it up, look at it briefly, and then throw it in the general direction of where we imagined the infield was. Then the real outfielder would take over, although by that point the batter had already rounded the bases at least once. Occasionally, when all of the far outfielders were daydreaming simultaneously, a ball would actually hit one of us.
The league I belonged to was called the MBBL, which stood for Manor Boys Baseball League. I have no idea who the “Manor Boys” were, or why the league was named for them. As I recall, anyone whose parents were willing to pay the “equipment fee” was accepted in the league. At that age (I was nine and a half, going on ten, as we used to say), kids were expected to join stuff, to find out where they fit and where they didn’t. Some were fortunate to discover their callings right away—in this case, they became the pitchers and the home-run hitters; the rest of us wound up in the far outfield. But the good part of the deal was, we all got to wear the caps (and being a member of the team also gave us a license to wear our caps off the field, a license I used liberally).
Our team was known as the Senators, which happened to also be the name of our Major League Baseball team at the time—the Washington Senators (an inspired name, reportedly chosen over such formidable runners-up as the Congressmen, the Vice Presidents, and the House Ways and Means Committee). The teams we played were named for MLB clubs, too, most of them referring to birds, Native Americans, or sock colors.
The sandlot Senators actually beat the big-league Senators once, incidentally, in a historic night game at D.C. Stadium, by a score of, I think, thirty-seven to nothing. Well, okay, not technically. We never really played the Washington Senators. But people used to say that we could beat them if we ever did. That’s because the Washington Senators of the mid- to late-1960s were about the worst team in the history of baseball. Their combined batting average was something like .0057 and their earned run average was, I believe, 21.7. They were the Hamilton Burgers of big-league baseball. There was a saying about the Senators back then: “Washington—first in War, first in Peace, and last in the American League.”
As a kid, though, I didn’t get that. Not at all. I always thought the big-league Senators were on the verge of a spectacular turnaround—like those fallen comic book heroes who suddenly found a hidden reservoir of strength which enabled them to rise up and pummel the bad guys into submission.
Even when the season was winding down, and the Senators were a hundred and fifty games behind, I would listen faithfully each night, sitting under the stars on our back porch in the D.C. suburbs, a nine-volt transistor radio pressed to my ear, my heart thumping as the game went into the top of the ninth with the Senators down by something like 21–0 and Frank Howard coming to the plate.
One of the saving graces about the big-league Senators, my father liked to point out, was that some of the teams that came to Washington to beat the crap out of us really were good. Several times each summer he’d take us downtown to see the Senators play the Yankees, for instance, and we’d get to watch such legendary players as Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford. That didn’t excite me a whole lot, though. I was too loyal to the Senators. (In 1972, the Washington Senators were sent away to Texas for rehabilitation, a process that involved, among other things, being co-owned for several years by George W. Bush. It took thirty years before another baseball team came to Washington. There’s a saying about this new team, which is called the Nationals: “Washington—first in War, first in Peace, and last in the National League.”)
The author, right, at age five, wearing his first cap, shares a wagon with his younger brother.
Of course, the sports world was a smaller place then. We had great athletes, but we didn’t yet call them “superstars.” Television networks didn’t pay billions of dollars a year to broadcast baseball and football games. Endorsement deals didn’t double or triple the annual Defense Department budget, as they do now. Merchandising was a modest side business; fans didn’t walk around wearing caps and jerseys advertising their favorite teams.
In fact, if you did wear a cap, of any sort, back then, people tended to think you were a little strange. My mom—who was a wonderful person in every other way—sometimes wore
