A Brief History of the Baseball Hat or Cap:
If the United States has a national hat, it is surely the
baseball cap. Even golfers, tennis players, and football players wear
them, either when playing or while standing on the sidelines.
Mail-carriers, truck drivers, and Boy Scouts wear them, too.
It took many years for baseball players to settle on the style
of cap so familiar today. The first baseball team, the Knickerbockers,
wore straw hats! From the 1840s to the 1870s, players wore all sorts of
hats - boating caps, jockey caps, even bicycling hats. In the 1870s,
a pillbox-style hat with a flat top and a short visor became popular.
This was the "Chicago style" cap.
In 1860, the Brooklyn Excelsiors wore a cap that's a forerunner
of today's rounded-crown, large-visor caps. This "Brooklyn style" had
evolved from a "Boston style," and it caught on about 1900. It had a
tight crown and a button on top, placed toward the front.
The modern cap arrived in the 1940s, when latex rubber replaced
buckram (coarse cotton) as the stiffening material inside the visor.
Now the visors could be longer. As for wearing baseball caps backwards:
Catchers wore their caps backward so the visor didn't interfere with
their protective mask. But it may have been outfielder Ken Griffey Jr.
of the Seattle Mariners who first got children to turn their caps
around, too.
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