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, one of the largest company cap producers of the time, reported selling about 300,000 caps a week in 1978.
Promotional caps had nothing to do with the American Sports Culture, but they made the ball cap accessible in America’s heartland and an accepted advertising tool in the business world.
FACTOR 4
Sunscreen
Coco Chanel supposedly popularized the suntan when she fell asleep on the deck of a yacht off the southern coast of France in 1923 and returned to shore looking startlingly bronzed. When branded suntan lotion came on the American market in the 1940s, its purpose wasn’t sun protection, it was tan enhancement. One of Coppertone’s early ad campaigns depicted an Indian chief and the slogan “Don’t Be a Paleface.” In 1953, Little Miss Coppertone first appeared on billboards in Miami. The soon-to-be-iconic illustration showed a cute black dog tugging down the swim trunks of an adorable, pig-tailed blonde girl, revealing her pale derriere. Later sunscreen ads featured sultry, deeply tanned models. To be tan in those days was to be young and beautiful.
In the 1970s, suntanning was still one of America’s favorite idle-time activities. But concerns about skin cancer were mounting, causing some people to rethink their sun-worshipping ways. In 1972, the Food and Drug Administration reclassified suntan lotion from a cosmetic to an over-the-counter drug. Two years later, a Swiss chemist adapted a system he called Sun Protection Factor, or SPF, which measured how effectively suntan lotion protected skin from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. In 1978, with skin cancer rates climbing, the FDA created the SPF measurement system and issued this warning: “Overexposure to the sun may lead to premature aging of the skin and skin cancer.” By the 1980s, the term suntan lotion had been replaced by sunscreen.
By the 1980s, the ball cap was becoming a popular form of protection from the harmful rays of the sun.
Like cigarettes—which American culture promoted for decades as being cool, sophisticated, and sexy—suntans could lead to some very uncool consequences. As people became more and more aware of this, they grew skittish about the sun. For protection, they slathered on high-SPF sunscreen and, often, wore hats. Because the baseball cap was cheap and its brim shaded part of the face, many people developed the habit of wearing a ball cap when they went outdoors as a means of sun protection, and to keep the glare from their eyes.
FACTOR 5
The Magnum Effect
From 1980 to 1988, Tom Selleck starred as Thomas Magnum on Magnum, P.I., the CBS television series about a Hawaii-based private investigator. Magnum was the first television hero and sex symbol to regularly wear a baseball cap. Beginning with an episode titled “China Doll” (broadcast December 18, 1980), Magnum frequently wore a Detroit Tigers cap, with the famous Old English “D” logo on the crown. Selleck was a Tigers fan in real life.
His wearing the cap on Magnum, P.I. did two things: It made sporting a ball cap seem cool rather than quirky; and it created an interest in authentic MLB caps, which by the end of the eighties would be doing a bang-up business.
Thomas Magnum was a Vietnam veteran who also wore a VM02 cap on the series (for those keeping score, it was first seen in the episode “Tropical Madness” from November 12, 1981). The VM02 cap came from Magnum’s stint with naval intelligence in Da Nang during the Vietnam War. It should be noted that he also occasionally wore a red-and-white “Al’s Collision and Muffler Shop” cap. No fooling.
Once Selleck had broken the cap ceiling, so to speak, other TV characters were seen in pro-sports caps, including former Oakland cop Mark Gordon (Victor French) on Highway to Heaven (1984–1989), who often wore an Oakland A’s cap; and McGyver (Richard Dean Anderson), the secret agent and adventurer from the show of the same name (1985–1992), who wore a black-and-red or white-and-red Calgary Flames hockey cap.
Now, of course, many