My goofy Holy Cross College cap

One of the oddest caps in my collection isn’t a baseball cap but this circular, beanie-like cap. I bought it at the Holy Cross College bookstore while I was in school there in the mid 1970s. I rarely wore the thing, which my friends routinely referred to as my “douche cap.” I once asked why. […]

New caps for 2009 U.S. Open golf at Bethpage Black

The United States Golf Association has unveiled its official caps for the 2009 U.S. Open, which will be played at that great public golf course on Long Island, Bethpage Black. I’ll wait a while for mine, which will come when I renew my USGA membership next year.

The ecstasy – and the agony – of September baseball

April is the cruelest month, T.S. Elliott said. But he never had to suffer through September on a baseball club eliminated from playoff contention in August. That’s the plight of the Seattle Mariners, who’ve been left in the dusty cellar of the American League West. As I write this post, the M’s are 30.5 games […]

The Cleveland Browns and a brand new NFL season

The Thursday night game between the Redskins and Giants notwithstanding, today marks the real kickoff to the 2008 National Football League season. In celebration, I took my natty corduroy Cleveland Browns cap out into the warm California sun for a morning portrait. I call this a classic Browns cap because it dates not from the […]

A Labor Day salute to the American Rust Belt

As a tribute to working men and women this Labor Day weekend, I offer this tableau featuring a lunch pail and a U.S. Steel cap. The cap was a gift from my daughter, an engineer with the big Pittsburgh-based steelmaker. This post is also a salute to the Rust Belt, that swath of mostly Midwestern […]

Wisconsin Badgers throwback cap

College football season kicks off Saturday, and to celebrate the annual rites of fall I present this late 1970s banded mesh-back cap. In the late 70s and early 1980s, this was the predominant college cap style. In fact, I’m hard pressed to remember any college caps from that era that didn’t look like this one. […]

These baseball caps freak me out

When I have some time to kill, I’ll often head over to the Major League Baseball or Minor League Baseball Web sites to salivate and dream over the ballcaps and other merchandise they offer. This morning, I decided to broaden my search and entered a Google search for baseball caps. The major cap-making companies popped […]

McCain or Obama: Who looks better in a ball cap?

Ready or not, the Democratic National Convention begins in Denver on Monday, to be followed a week later by the Republican convention. There’s no doubt about the nominees: Barack Obama for the Democrats, John McCain for the GOP. Which leaves us with one serious question: which president will look better in a baseball cap? Making […]

In praise of minor league baseball

If there’s anything more American than baseball, it’s minor league baseball. I grew up knowing only the big-league variety, although one could argue that the Cleveland Indians of the 1960s and 70s were anything but major league. Over the past decade I’ve become a fan of minor league ball, which has enjoyed a resurgence across […]

The newspaper cap and a changing industry

This post is a tough one. As a journalist, I’ve accumulated several newspaper caps from hundreds of visits to newsrooms and industry conventions. Collectively, they are among my favorites because they represent the vitality and pride of my profession. But the newspaper industry is in decline, severely so in towns deep in the clenches of […]