straw hats. In the 1860s, as semiprofessional baseball began to take root, particularly in New York City, an early version of what we know as the baseball cap, with a bill and a curved crown, was born.
Here are ten evolutionary signposts on the road to the modern-day professional baseball cap:
Boston/Brooklyn Style
The Brooklyn style hat, worn by the Brooklyn Excelsiors in the 1860s, was, in some ways, the forerunner of the modern ball cap. This cap incorporated elements of other hats, including the jockey cap and military hats. A similar cap, advertised in Spalding Guide, was called the Boston Style Cap. Both featured a small brim and a round, forward-leaning crown, with a button on top joining the stitching. The earliest cap in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, from 1866, is similar to these caps. This style was not widely worn until the late 1890s.
Pillbox
A more popular design was the “Chicago style” pillbox cap, with a flat top, a short bill, and horizontal or vertical stripes. This style, derived from military caps, was the most popular when the National League was formed in 1876 and continued to be widespread throughout the 1880s and the 1890s.
Letters and Logos
Letters identifying team names and home cities began appearing in the 1880s, although they did not become widely used until the late 1890s. The first big-league club to put an image of the team’s nickname on its cap was the Detroit Tigers in 1901. That cap featured a running orange tiger.
The last big-league team to don a cap without a letter or a logo was the 1945 St. Louis Browns, who wore a white cap with thin orange and brown stripes.
Air Holes
Air holes in the crowns of baseball caps were not a feature in the pillbox hats, but appeared in other ball caps during the 1890s. Their function was to allow air to enter the cap and cool the head on hot days. Air holes became a regular part of the baseball cap by the first decade of the twentieth century.
An advertisement for “Base Ball Caps” from the 1888 edition of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide.
Standardization
The 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.
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