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 athlete and the world of the civilian spectator.
The 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