On the road again (The importance of the proper baseball cap)

 

A baseball cap is a crucial part of any serious baseball fan’s attire. In fact, when we had custom closets put in a few years back, one of the requirements was that I have a drawer where I could put my baseball caps.

Over the course of my lifetime (before this trip), I can remember having caps for at least seven different current teams, plus two defunct ones (the Expos and the Browns). In some cases, I’ve just had one cap, for one reason or another, but I’ve had many caps from the two teams that have been our hometown teams, the Cardinals and the Diamondbacks. I brought along a few appropriate ones on this trip.

But you might wonder why I’ve had so many different caps. Are my loyalties that fickle? Actually, it traces back to an accident of my birth, specifically, the fact that I was born in central Kansas in the 1950s, hundreds of miles from the nearest MLB team. I no longer have it, but I’m pretty sure I got my first major league baseball cap about 60 years ago, and it was the white “KC” on the dark blue background of the Kansas City Athletics. Whether the Kansas City A’s should be considered an MLB team is debatable, but they certainly weren’t a heavy local favorite in Salina, Kansas.

My first memories of baseball are as a just-turned-7-year-old in Salina during the 1962 season. I kind of liked the Dodgers, because they had just moved west (and we thought of ourselves as part of the West), but the team that really intrigued me was the Philadephia Phillies. That’s because their manager, the youngest manager in baseball at the time, was someone who had been born in Salina, Gene Mauch. Furthermore, Mauch was highly regarded. At the time, I didn’t know enough baseball to know how bad the Phillies usually were, so I didn’t realize what an accomplishment it was for the Phillies to be a winning team. I also grew enamored by baseball strategy, so the fact that Mauch was widely considered one of the best strategic managers in the game sealed the deal. Even after my family moved from Salina (I didn’t know until years later that Mauch’s family had left Salina when he was 12, so we both left as kids), and even after he left the Phillies, I followed his teams for the rest of his career.

Unfortunately, he never managed in a World Series, although he won more than 1900 games as a manager, and three times came within a game of the World Series. In 1964, the Phils were 6.5 games ahead in the standings with 12 to go, but lost 10 in a row. In 1982 and 1986, his California Angels teams had a combined six games in which they were a win away from the Series, but lost all six, some dramatically. I don’t believe any manager has won more MLB games without winning a league championship.

From the vantage point of the 21^st Century, I understand why Mauch was doomed to lose more games than he won. He loved strategies like the sacrifice bunt and the stolen base that advance runners one base at a time. However, as analysis of baseball statistics became more widespread, it became clear that those are bad strategies, or at least that they have been for the last several decades. That’s because even a successful sacrifice bunt gives away an out, and while it makes it more likely that your team will score a run in that inning, it makes it less likely that they will score four or five. The statistical analyses that showed that came out very late in Mauch’s career. I wonder if Mauch, who died in 1997, realized that he had been mismanaging his whole career. Based on his cerebral reputation, I suspect that if he started managing 30 years later, he would have been at the forefront of the statistics revolution in baseball – and would have won multiple World Series.

Anyway, while I had an A’s cap, I convinced my mother to buy a plain red cap, and I cut out a piece of white cardboard and glued it on to make it a Phillies’ cap, and that’s the one that I wore proudly. Later, I bought caps of the teams he managed (hence the Expos), friends gave me caps for their favorite teams, and so on.

When Kansas City got a real Major League team, the Royals (and they were very, very good for their first 20 years), I was out of the area, and never got hooked on them, although I’ve always had a soft spot for that cap, even if the Royal blue is a little lighter than that of the cap I had in the 1960s. I made my first, and presumably last, cap purchase of this trip in Kansas City.

Meanwhile, I wore my Diamondbacks "pride" cap most of the time. I already had caps from the Cardinals, Rockies and Rangers, so I wore those in the appropriate park. And I got a Rockies 30th anniversary trucker's cap in a Sunday giveaway. So I started with four caps, and I'm going home with six (unless there's another giveaway in the next few days).