ball caps ascended to such prominence is a question with no simple, single answer. Nor can we say with certainty where the cap-wearing trend will lead or how long it will last. But we do know where the ball cap came from: It was born on the fields of America’s “national pastime.”
Like baseball itself, early ball caps were derived from existing models—among them cricket, jockey, and military caps. But in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, as the country began to distinguish itself on the world stage, baseball took on a uniquely American personality, complete with its own unifying rules, its own traditions, its own venues, and its own uniform. The baseball cap as we know it today—with the six-panel crown, visor, and top button—has its roots in this era.
The idea that baseball is America’s “national sport” first began to circulate in the decade before the Civil War (on the heels of such ideas as American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny). Baseball was one of a number of factors that stitched together our disparate, still-fledgling country, helping to assimilate droves of immigrants and to strengthen the identities of America’s cities. In some ways, the story of how the cap evolved parallels the story of how the country evolved.
To learn the origins of the baseball cap, we went first in search of the origins of baseball—journeying into a rich and rolling land of lore, where the scenery is often awe-inspiring but seldom to be trusted. We begin with a visit to baseball’s “birthplace”—Cooperstown, New York, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
BIRTH OF BASEBALL
Baseball was invented, the story goes (or, went), in the tiny village of Cooperstown, New York, in 1839. The inventor of the game was a twenty-year-old Army cadet named Abner Doubleday. On a summer afternoon in 1839, Doubleday pulled a stick through the dirt in Elihu Phinney’s cow pasture—once, twice, thrice, four times—tracing the outlines of a baseball diamond, then extended the first- and third-field lines to create an outfield. He scratched marks in the dirt to show where the fielders stood, and later wrote out a set of rules describing how the game was played. Doubleday also came up with the name for this new sport: “base ball.”
Those were the findings, anyway, of a group called the Mills Commission, which was convened in 1905 to determine baseball’s origins. The commission’s findings, summarized in a report released on the next-to-last day of 1907, stated that, “according to the best evidence obtainable to date, (baseball) was devised by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y. in 1839.”
The report concluded, “In the years to come, in the view of the hundreds of thousands of people who are devoted to baseball, and the millions who will be, Abner Doubleday’s fame will rest evenly, if not quite as much, upon the fact that he was (baseball’s) inventor … as upon his brilliant and distinguished career as an officer in the Federal Army.”
At the time, baseball was not only America’s national sport; it was also becoming a thriving national industry. Six years earlier, the American League had been launched, challenging the hegemony of the National League, which had monopolized professional baseball since 1876. The National League was created by a group of team owners and managers who realized that they could make more money by pooling resources and controlling who was allowed in the league—a business model that set the pattern for professional sports leagues in America, which continues today. The introduction of eight American League teams in 1901 (in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Washington) led to two years of bitter rivalry between the leagues. But in 1903, sensing that both sides would benefit by joining forces, the American and National Leagues staged the first “World Series,” and a new, larger monopoly was created. (In that first, best-of-eight series, American League pennant winners the Boston Americans (later the Red Sox) upset the National League’s Pittsburgh Pirates 5–3.)
Abner Doubleday, the “inventor” of baseball, according to the 1907 Mills Commission report.
As the sport grew more widespread, its uniform became increasingly standardized. Gone was the smorgasbord of cap styles that followed the earliest straw hat days. At the time of the Mills report, the pillbox cap, popular in the 1880s and 1890s, had been replaced by what would become the modern-day baseball cap.
Baseball had developed from the gentlemanly, upper middle-class club game of the 1840s and 1850s—a game modeled on English cricket—into a highly competitive, commercially driven spectator sport. Early wooden baseball stadiums—known as baseball parks, grounds, or fields—came along in the 1860s, with bleacher seating for hundreds and eventually thousands. Hilltop Park, where the Highlanders (later the Yankees) played from 1903 to 1912 in upper Manhattan, had a capacity of sixteen thousand with room for ten thousand standing patrons. The first steel-and-concrete stadium, Shibe Park in Philadelphia, opened in 1909, with seating for twenty-three thousand.
Baseball gradually took on the grain of the country. The Book of American Pastimes, the first comprehensive study of sports in America, noted, “(Baseball) is a game peculiarly suited to the American temperament and disposition … it has an excitement and vim about it.” That was 1866. Two decades later, the American poet Walt Whitman said, “Baseball is our game, the American game … I connect it with our national character.”
Baseball was a game made for heroes—a team sport that emphasized the individual. Its symbolism was suitably American: each man taking his turn, standing alone, with an equal but limited number of chances to hit back whatever life threw at him. Baseball was a microcosm of the American dream, and the stage for a burgeoning American mythology, played out in the long shadows of late afternoons on grass-and-dirt fields in front of bleachers filled with thousands of people who dressed up for the occasion.
The actual origins of the sport, though, had been disputed for many years. Newspaperman Henry Chadwick, a cricket reporter who began covering baseball in 1856, was one of the game’s early boosters—he may have been the first to use the term “national pastime”—but he didn’t buy the idea that baseball was an American invention. Chadwick, born in England, maintained that the sport was simply a variation of longstanding English ball-and-bat games such as rounders.
For many Americans, who took pride in their nascent national sport, the notion that baseball may have originated in England seemed decidedly unpatriotic. It bothered no one as much as former baseball-star-turned-sporting-goods-impresario Albert Spalding. Big and blustery, with a brush mustache and a flair for self-promotion, Spalding had been a pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings and the Chicago White Stockings, who compiled a career won-loss record of 253–65. Shortly before retiring as a player in 1878, he and his brother started a sporting goods business that would become the country’s largest. As a player, team manager, and owner, Spalding was one of the most influential men in the sport for about thirty years.
Spalding was friendly with Chadwick, but the men disagreed on the origins of the national sport. After Chadwick made the case, in a 1903 article, that baseball was really an English game, Spalding responded by creating the Mills Commission. The commission consisted of Abraham Mills, former president of baseball’s National League and Spalding’s longtime friend; Morgan Bulkeley, a U.S. Senator and the National League’s first president; James Sullivan, president of the Amateur Athletic Union; Alfred Reach and George Wright, sporting goods distributors and former ball players; Arthur Gorman, a former player and president of the Washington Base Ball Club; and Nicholas Young, also a former National League president.
The commission advertised across the country, seeking input from anyone who had knowledge or information about the invention of baseball. For two years, letters came in, mostly from former ball players. But the commission did little legwork or follow-through. Its report, which included a dissenting comment from Chadwick, was nevertheless widely accepted for several decades.
The
