liberation of the ball cap, then, was also the uprooting of an entrenched cultural stereotype. As with many revolutions, the Ball Cap Revolution seemed to happen quickly—although, in fact, it was years in the making. What follows are Eight Factors behind the Cap Revolution—eight separate cultural currents (whose sources flow back as far as post-World War II) that reached a confluence in the 1980s, making it acceptable, and then fashionable (and, in some cases, maybe even heroic) to wear a baseball cap.
FACTOR 1
The Marriage of Sports and Television
The union of sports and television in the late 1940s and early 1950s began a partnership that would nudge professional sports toward the center of American society and ultimately create the American Sports Culture, a multi-billion-dollar industry that would demand not only our attention but also our participation. And, it would lay the groundwork for the sports merchandising boom of the 1980s.
Television made sporting events more accessible to more people. As TV technology improved, it also made them more nuanced, so that the experience of watching a game on television was nothing like watching one in person. In the late 1940s, baseball was broadcast from three static cameras, all located on the mezzanine level; there were no zoom lenses; one announcer gave the play-by-play. Sports broadcasting steadily became more sophisticated and, eventually, cinematic: We saw the game from multiple perspectives, up close and high above; we saw plays repeated, in super slow motion; we saw the facial expressions of the players on the field—grinning, grimacing, concentrating, cursing. Television made the game and the players seem life-size, and it put them in our living rooms. It continues to do so—with high-definition and giant-screen televisions. In 2008, a football game between the San Diego Chargers and Oakland Raiders was even screened in 3-D—trumpeted as an initial step toward regular 3-D sports broadcasts. Why not? Writer Michael Arlen famously called Vietnam the “living room war” because it was the first war that unfolded on our television screens (TV was still in its infancy during the Korean War). With the rise of television, American sports became the Living Room Game.
It happened quickly: When the first World Series was televised in 1947, an estimated 3.9 million people watched (many of them in bars), as the Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers four games to three. It was by far the largest television audience up to that point. Less than 1 percent of American households had a television set in 1947. But by 1955, 67 percent of U.S. households had TV sets; and by 1960, almost 90 percent did. Television united the country as the Internet would in the 1990s, although it provided much more limited choices. With only a handful of stations, we all watched the same shows, and sports became a major part of the equation. By the mid-fifties, all sixteen teams in Major League Baseball had television contracts.
Big-league sports expanded dramatically in the television age, creating new markets and giving more people “home teams” to root for and support. In 1960, Major League Baseball fielded sixteen teams, the same number as in 1901. It added eight more in the 1960s (Los Angeles Angels and Washington Senators, 1961; New York Mets and Houston Colt .45s, 1962; Seattle Pilots, San Diego Padres, Montreal Expos, and Kansas City Royals, 1969). Today, Major League Baseball has thirty teams.
The cost of television contracts for all major sports soared in the sixties and seventies. So did salaries. In 1975, Major League Baseball players were granted the right to free agency, meaning they could negotiate with any club in the league after a one-year option on their contracts expired. Salaries jumped. In 1975, the average MLB player earned just $44,600 (about $94,500 in 2008 dollars). Ten years later, the average salary was up to $369,000 ($714,000). Last year, the average salary was more than $2.4 million.
As the cinematography of sports broadcasting continued to evolve, and salaries approached those of movie stars, we began to see sports differently—as entertainment and as big business, not just as athletic competition. The most-watched television program each year became the Super Bowl, and the main draw for many of those who tuned in were the commercials, not the game. The business of sports depended on fans and outside sources to keep it growing. The notion that professional sports would enhance a community’s economic development and social status led to additional franchises in new markets and taxpayer-subsidized stadiums. Sports became a central part of cities’ identities. We embraced and supported our home teams, and in doing so showed loyalty to our communities. A sports mythology took hold in America, which affected how we thought, how we interacted with one another, and what we wore. In this environment, people were ready to buy products advertising their favorite teams. It was just a question of making them available.
FACTOR 2
Grassroots Baseball
At the same time that television was transforming big league sports, Little League, and its sandlot cousins, were proliferating in small towns across America. In 1947, the year the first major league World Series was televised, Little League held a World Series of its own—its first. Little League ball had sixty teams that year and about a thousand players. Ten years later, almost half a million boys were playing in the Little League on 19,500 teams in forty-seven states. There are now about 200,000 Little League teams in all fifty states and eighty countries.
Founded by a Pennsylvania lumberyard clerk in 1939, Little League brought baseball—and the baseball cap—to small-town boys throughout the nation (girls, alas, weren’t allowed to play until 1974). Many boys wore their caps off the field, as well, during a period when hat-wearing in general was in decline.
Millions of teenagers, meanwhile, wore baseball caps on the fields of American Legion Baseball, which was begun in 1925 in Milbank, South Dakota, and became a national program the next year.
Minor League Baseball also flourished after the Second World War, with attendance jumping from ten million in 1945 to thirty-two million the next year and forty million in 1949. At its peak, minor league ball was played in more than three hundred cities in the country. Interest declined in the fifties, for various reasons, including television; it surged again in the 1970s, and in recent years has approached its peak year of 1949.
Grassroots baseball widened the game’s scope, making it a participatory sport—and, in the process, validating cap-wearing at levels other than just the big leagues.
FACTOR 3
Promo Caps: One Size Fits All
While Grassroots Baseball took the game—and the cap—into small-town America, an unrelated trend scattered the ball cap throughout rural America.
In the late sixties, a new promotional accessory known as the “company cap” emerged—a cheap, plastic mesh ball cap with a tall, foam front emblazoned with a company logo. The caps featured a snap-lock, plastic tab on the back, so that one size fit all heads.
Conceived as an advertising ploy, company caps were typically given away to customers and potential customers. Agriculture businesses were among the first to use the promo caps, along with auto dealers and manufacturers. But businesses were surprised to find people requesting the caps, and some companies began selling them. A spokesman for John Deere said that orders for the company’s signature green-and-yellow caps increased about 40 percent a year in 1974, 1975, and 1976 before leveling off.
In 1978, the Chicago Sun-Times took note of this trend: “The company cap is one of the hottest advertising and promotional tools for the nation’s companies, from giant Caterpillar to local bait shops,” the paper noted. “Brightly colored and bearing a patch with a company’s logo, the cap has outclassed—if not outnumbered—T-shirts and occasionally turned into a collector’s prize. For companies like DeKalb AgResearch, Caterpillar, International Harvester, Goodyear, and Ford, the cap has been a promoter’s dream. Take a trip into the countryside and see them sprouting from nearly every head.”
K-Products,
