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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 in 2008 dollars). Ten years later, the average salary was up to $369,000 ($714,000). Last year, the average salary was more than $2.4 million.

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 celebrities are often seen wearing pro (particularly Yankees) ball caps. A website called Capitate has a gallery of famous people—from Madonna to Bill Clinton to Chris Rock—wearing the caps of their favorite teams.

But it started with Thomas Magnum.

FACTOR 6

Buying In: The Merchandise Boom

In 1978, the New Era cap company placed an ad in Sporting News newspaper for authentic Major League Baseball caps. At the time, New Era and Sports Specialties were the two major licensed manufacturers of pro-ball caps. (Sports Specialties, also the first licensee of the National Football League, was founded in 1928 by David Warsaw who, among other things, invented the bobble-head doll. The company, a pioneer in the field of licensed sportswear, was sold to Nike in 1993.)

This was New Era’s first attempt at mail order and as company historian Karl Koch recalls, “We had to shut it down, there were too many orders coming in. These weren’t people who went to games. They were out in the middle of Iowa and places like that. It was an early sign that people wanted this.”

At the time, merchandising was still a relatively modest side business. Accessories and souvenirs were sold at games, but the sale of official products was otherwise very limited. In the 1980s, this would change.

Large-scale merchandising was the logical next step in the American Sports Culture. It built the culture in two ways: first, it created a new revenue stream; second, the products creating that revenue stream advertised the culture. Getting people to buy a product that serves as an advertisement for itself is a pretty sweet deal if you can pull it off.

In 1986, MLB and New Era teamed up to produce the Diamond Collection, which officially sanctioned the on-field product. “‘Wear the caps the pros wear’ became the idea,” Koch says.

Professional sports was a shared national passion by then, which played out in millions of living rooms across the country. Wearing apparel sanctioned by the big leagues brought fans closer to the action and closer to one another; it was an investment in their teams. The ball cap market seemed a natural—and it was.

FACTOR 7

Patriot Caps

In the mid-1980s, another trend attracted a very different sort of cap-wearer. After a decade clouded by war, political scandal, gas shortages, and runaway inflation, a new mood of optimism and patriotism settled over much of the country in the early 1980s. In a speech given on March 8, 1983, in Orlando, Florida, President Ronald Reagan first used the phrase “evil empire” in discussing the Soviet Union and what he called “the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” The next year, Tom Clancy’s Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October—a book Reagan strongly endorsed—became a No. 1 bestseller. The image of the American military, tarnished by the Vietnam War years, gained new luster during the Reagan presidency. People felt good about their country.

Rob Reiner, as director Marty DiBergi, wore this variation of the USS Coral Sea CV-43 cap in the 1984 film This is Spinal Tap.

The public supported substantial increases in defense spending during this time and became increasingly interested in books and films pertaining to the military, among them First Blood (1982), An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Clancy’s string of best-selling “techno-thrillers.” The No. 1 box-office draw of 1986, Top Gun, showed off sophisticated U.S. military technology—and the bravery and skills of the Navy’s elite fighter pilots. Among its many influences, the film caused a run on U.S. Navy ball caps embroidered with the word TOPGUN, and other service-related caps.

Mary Beth Cox, a northern Virginia store owner, says she sold about ten thousand caps in the year after Top Gun. “I guess ball caps are a barometer of patriotism,” she told the Washington Post in 1986. “I think that maybe during Vietnam, which was a bad time, they wouldn’t have been as popular.”

Cox still sells Navy caps, in addition to caps from all American service branches. While the appeal of military caps has waned since “the Top Gun era,” she says there is still a steady market for them. “I probably sell about four thousand caps a year now, most of which are military. I carry ball caps from all of the services … Caps that appeal to our vets are popular: WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.” Her store, Ship’s Hatch, also produces custom-made caps for every U.S. Navy ship that ever sailed.

Military caps, which showed support for the United States and its armed forces during an optimistic decade, continue to be a symbol of patriotism and are often worn by veterans.

FACTOR 8

The Rebellion, Backwards and Sideways

But something else was happening in the 1980s. As the ball cap went mainstream, endorsing such American institutions as Major League Baseball and the military, young people adopted the ball cap and endowed it with another meaning altogether: Wearing a cap became a symbol of personal expression and rebellion—particularly when worn backwards; or sideways.

In the popular music world, two movements turned the ball cap this way: hip-hop and grunge.

Hip-hop, or rap, music was born in New York City during the 1970s. As it became more widespread and eclectic in the eighties—particularly after the founding of Def Jam Recordings in 1984—a hip-hop culture took root, which began to influence music, film, television, and fashion.

An offspring of hip-hop known as “gangsta rap” arrived in the late 1980s. Among the pioneers of this style was a Compton, California-based group called N.W.A. Although their music was often banned from radio play, N.W.A. (which stood for Niggaz With Attitude) sold almost ten million CDs in a five-year lifespan (1986–1991). Group members Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Easy-E all went on to become top-selling solo artists. N.W.A.’s music and attitude were outrageously violent and politically incorrect, and also very popular. Their outlaw look included black-and-silver Oakland Raiders ball caps. The ball cap became a hip-hop staple by the early nineties and remains so today.

In the Pacific Northwest, meanwhile—about nine hundred and seventy-five miles north of Compton—another musical rebellion was taking shape. In the mid-1980s, an alternative rock music known as grunge was attracting a following in the Seattle area. Grunge incorporated elements of punk rock and heavy metal, but the music had its own unique sensibility, an odd blend of alienation, anger, and apathy. The best-known bands to come out of this underground rock movement, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, were among the top-selling music artists of the 1990s.

The grunge attitude was reflected in what came to be called “grunge fashion.” Grunge fashion was really anti-fashion, a reaction against what some saw as the yuppiefication of America during the 1980s. Many bands, and fans, sported a working-class look that seemed inspired by Washington state’s lumber industry—checkered shirts, torn trousers, work boots, and baseball caps worn backwards.

Wearing a ball cap has become a symbol of personal expression and even rebellion.

Karl Koch, historian for the New Era cap company, says it all had something to do with irony. “The classic rock bands never wore caps. Then the MTV generation came along and there was this shift. It was okay to do things you’d never done before. It was okay to wear a logging uniform on stage and a baseball cap. Everyone was making fun of things. Everything was ironic all of a sudden.”