Sunday, February 28, 2010

Ranting Stan's Irrational Hatred Of The Week: Baseball caps

The baseball cap has done remarkably well for itself, considering that it originates from a sport that has failed to catch on in any significant way beyond North America. We may not have gone mad over the USA's glorified version of a school game, but we can't get enough of the revolting headgear that it spawned. I have no idea why.

If we had fallen in love with baseball as a sport, I could at least understand why the baseball cap has become so popular - but we haven't. And yet, everywhere you go you see people - young and old - sporting these titfers with various logos that often have nothing to do with baseball.

Why? They have no aesthetic appeal whatsoever, offer very little real protection from the elements and once you've put one on you are unable to take it off as doing so leaves your hair in a mess and a stripe across your forehead. Worse still, having bought the damn thing, you then give free advertising to the company that sold it to you! They should be paying us to wear them!

Perhaps the most perplexing decision to start wearing baseball caps comes from cricket teams who, on the whole, have abandoned the traditional cricket cap in favour of baseball versions - the exception being Australia who retain the "baggy green" which they wear with pride. Good for them!

I have no objection to people wearing hats - indeed, I wish more of us would wear fedoras, panamas, homburgs, trilbys, cloth caps or whatever takes your fancy, but not revolting baseball caps.

I hate them.

8 comments:

Larry said...

Even worse when these idiots wear them back to front.

JuliaM said...

I was very glad to have my 'Jeep' cap in the car today when I made the dash to Sainsbury's entrance through the pouring rain..! :)

Mark Wadsworth said...

a) It's not called 'baseball' over here, we refer to it as 'rounders'.

b) They stopped wearing them back to front in the mid or late 1990s, although I'm not sure of the exact date.

jonno said...

I used to wear mine, side to side,but gave it away,when people started whispering in my nose. Jonno, SPLA

Macheath said...

They had to stop wearing baseball caps back to front when they started wearing them with pulled-up hoods in a sort of sartorial tautology.

Now all we need is something that makes it impractical to wear trousers so low-slung they have to waddle like penguins.

Richard Matthews said...

Mark Wadsworth, I've just got back from a skiing holiday in Germany. Last night the pub was full of American students watching the final of the ice hockey in the Winter Olympics. All of them who were wearing baseball caps were wearing them back-to-front.

Furthermore, does anyone remember William Hague wearing a baseball cap a few years ago when he was leader of the opposition? I think the PR man who made him wear that should have been shot at dawn. Poor old William Hague was made to look like a nonce on day-release.

Anonymous said...

Real pikey chavs wear proper flat caps now! Well 'ard an' proper chavvy!

Tommy Brazil, Weald of Kent Romany

Elaine said...

Baseball is in fact played quite a bit outside North america. Taiwan, South Korea and Japan all have professional leagues and it is played a lot in several Carribean and South american countries.