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: Do you have any favorite baseball caps?
TS: I liked the halo on the top of the Los Angeles Angels cap in the early sixties. That was innovative. The Angels had an idea, went with the theme, and it became part of their identity. The other one was the “scrambled eggs” design on the Seattle Pilots cap. Those were two inspired caps. I’m an old-school kind of guy, but I don’t mind experimentation with uniforms.
BCN: What were the most significant changes to the baseball cap during the twentieth century?
TS: The longer bill and the vertical crown were the two significant developments. The vertical crown made sense—you could see the letter or the team logo better. It also set the stage for commercial caps, such as John Deere and Caterpillar. It helped make the cap a forehead billboard.
BCN: Ball caps are worn everywhere now off the ball field. Why has the cap grown so popular over the past thirty years?
TS: I don’t know if it’s possible to know why. I would say in part it’s a style-driven thing, but it’s hard to trace.
BCN: Now that most MLB games are played at night, what is the functional purpose of the baseball cap? Is there any reason for the visor, for instance?
TS: That’s something I’m looking at right now. Would a player be as good or better if he didn’t wear a baseball cap? Is it even beneficial? I don’t know. In other sports—in swimming or track, or bicycling, for instance—efforts are made to shave every second off your time by streamlining your equipment and uniform. Baseball’s origins go back to long before people thought that way. Caps are a tradition. Are they necessary? That’s a good question.
THE MODERN CAP
The look of the baseball cap hasn’t changed substantially since the mid-1950s, when the New Era company introduced its 59Fifty—the cap used by all Major League Baseball teams. Most ball caps worn casually today are similar in appearance to those of professional baseball, although they tend to be a cotton blend rather than polyester, to be less structured, and to have adjustable one-size-fits-all bands.
What has changed is people’s attitudes about the ball cap and about its role in our culture. Baseball caps may have been born on America’s ball fields, but they’re worn now for reasons that have nothing to do with baseball. This change in attitude was the result of a quiet American revolution that has not yet made its way into our history books. We’ll call it the Cap Revolution.
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THE CAP REVOLUTION
How the baseball cap morphed from a sports accessory to a symbol of American culture; eight forces that converged to create the Ball Cap Revolution.
“It has long been my conviction that we can learn far more about the conditions, and values, of a society by contemplating how it chooses to play, to use its free time, to take its leisure, than by examining how it goes about its work.”
–Bart Giamatti, former President of Yale University and seventh commissioner of Major League Baseball
UNTIL the late 1970s, wearing a ball cap anywhere but on the baseball field carried with it a cultural stigma—a stigma reinforced by decades of American films and television shows, which often depicted cap-wearers as comical or marginal characters. In the mid-1930s, Scotty Beckett pioneered the sideways/backwards ball cap look in the Our Gang comedies (a look likely inspired by Jackie Coogan’s oversized wool cap in Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film The Kid). Huntz Hall portrayed the buffoonish Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones in the Bowery Boys movies from 1946 to 1958, with his trademark flipped-brim ball cap. The style was adapted in the 1960s by backwoods mechanic/gas station attendant Gomer Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show and was parodied in the 1970s by Rick Nielsen of the rock band Cheap Trick. Then there was the Beav—Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver—who frequently wore an unlettered ball cap on the 1957–1963 sitcom Leave It to Beaver. And Oscar Madison, the slovenly half of The Odd Couple, who donned a Mets cap in the 1968 movie (when the Mets were still loveable losers) and on the 1970s television show. Not to mention Klinger on M*A*S*H in the 1970s, with his Toledo Mud Hens cap. In 1976’s Carrie, mean girl Norma Watson wore a red baseball cap throughout the film (even to the prom), whacking Carrie with it in the film’s opening sequence.
There are other examples—but few, if any, before 1980 portraying cap-wearers as heroes or sex symbols. For the longest time, baseball caps simply got no respect. Baseball players wore caps, of course, but there was a clear demarcation between the world of the professional
