Baseball cap
type of hat
A baseball cap is a type of soft hat with a rounded crown and a stiff bill projecting in front.
The front of the hat typically displays a design or a logo (historically, usually only a sports team, namely a baseball team, or names of relevant companies, when used as a commercial marketing technique). The hat may be "fitted" to the wearer's head or the back may have elastic, a plastic prong-in-a-hole (multiple holes with one prong that can be inserted), Velcro, a zipper, or a tri-glide slide so that it can be quickly adjusted to fit different wearers' heads. The baseball hat is a part of the traditional baseball uniform worn by players, with the brim pointing forward to shield the eyes from the sun. Since the 1980s, varieties of the hat have become prevalent in the United States and many other nations, both for utilitarian purposes (protecting the eyes from the sun) and as a fashion accessory.
History
In 1860, the Brooklyn Excelsiors wore the precursor to the modern rounded-top baseball cap, which featured a long peak and a button on top, and by 1900, the "Brooklyn-style" cap had become popular. The merino cap topped with a star-like pattern was made by the New York sporting goods company Peck & Snyder.
In the late 1880s, a pillbox version of the cap became popular and would later morph into the modern six-paneled round cap; five teams revived the pillbox form in 1976 in celebration of the US Bicentennial. Team monograms first appeared in 1894 when the Boston Baseball Club (the Boston Braves) — now the Atlanta Braves — became the first team to wear letterforms when they added a monogram-style device to their caps, followed by three more teams in the next season. The Detroit Tigers of 1901 were the first major league team to have a mascot — a red tiger on a dark background — on their ballcap.
The public source identifies “Baseball cap” as type of hat. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Baseball and type.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baseball cap” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.