Adventures in Millinery

It would seem natural to declare that by wearing a hat with a team logo on it, you are making a simple act of supporting that team. The political realists among us, however, would argue that this not entirely true. We live in a zero-sum world; support provided to one team is, consequently, support taken away from that team’s enemies. Alliances are unavoidable.

Perhaps, ordinarily, you have no issue with these secondary repercussions created by your headgear. This is well, but keep in mind that there will inevitably be times when you need to cover your head and maintain your explicit love of baseball, while at the same time avoiding the hypersensitive people with whom you share existence.

To this end, I offer the following options, all purchasable on your local internet:

The Implicit

It has its advantages: simple, cheap, and it confers a Zen-like embrace of nothingness. You can buy four dozen of them for sixty bucks and rest easy knowing that you have enough hats to last the rest of your life, available in whichever color suits your current mood. It also has its disadvantages: worn with casual clothing, you may be confused for an actor in a pharmaceutical commercial and/or a coach in a Tom Emanski training video. Other potential advantages: bedazzling!
 

The Explicit

Perhaps you don’t have a rooting interest in a particular team; you grew up in North Dakota, played third base in college for a small university, and connect to the game through your nostalgia. Perhaps you’re simply an honest person, someone who shares their heartfelt, unsolicited opinions with strangers. Perhaps your friends often comment on your homespun literal nature to the degree that you’ve decided that it’s part of your charm, and a little corner of your mind warns you not to dig deeper than this. Perhaps you’re a big fan of former reliever Michael Lawrence Birkebeck.

The Rebus

To wear a baseball cap with a baseball on it goes beyond simple diplomacy. It reminds the people around you that, at the root of it all, the ball itself is a common bond between all fans, regardless of the colors on their jerseys. It states that for most of us, the stimuli we encounter in life is remarkably similar, and that through this shared experience we work to craft our own individuality and form the meaning of our own lives. We use different words, maybe even different statistics, but in the end, baseball. Baseball is all of it; it always was.

(This is a very powerful hat.)

The Sucker Punch

Or perhaps you’re a misanthrope! As you sit and watch the poor people around you try desperately to carve meaning out of the unyielding ore that is life, you’ve chosen to become the stimuli that happens to other people. You are a force, a dark crusader. If this is the case, I offer this hat. I also remind you that hats are unique among the world of haberdashery in the sense that the wearer cannot see their own hat. Building on this powerful principle, it’s easy to make the logical step toward using one’s cap as a weapon against the unprepared.