By Josh Mosey | Digital Marketing Strategist
This year’s adult Summer Wonder prize has been more than 150 years in the making.
While the origins of baseball itself are still debated by historians, it is generally agreed that the rules for the modern version of the game were codified in New York on September 23, 1845, by the Knickerbocker Baseball Club. It took players five more years to finally do something about the sun interfering with their ability to track the ball through the sky.
The earliest baseball caps, worn around 1850, were made of straw and made players look like they had just wandered out of a barbershop quartet convention. The version we would recognize today wasn’t introduced until around 1860 by the Brooklyn Excelsiors. Over the following decades, variations in cap styles battled for space on diamonds across the country, but the Brooklyn-style cap, with its longer brim and button-topped crown, proved especially enduring.
A turning point came in 1901, when our own Detroit Tigers became the first Major League team to feature a mascot image on the front of their cap. With that stitch, the baseball cap began its transformation from simple sun protection into a powerful symbol of team identity and brand loyalty.
Fast forward to today, where you can now earn your own opportunity to identify with the Kent District Library brand. Tell your friends, family members and perfect strangers that you love the library without saying a word. Let them know that the library is on your mind — literally — as you stroll confidently down the street with your eyes shaded from the sun, knowing that you look both stylish and smart in your new library-loving baseball cap.
Sources:
Society for American Baseball Research. (n.d.). October 1845: The first recorded baseball games in New York. https://sabr.org
Clair, M. (2023, May 9). Baseball cap history and timeline. Major League Baseball. https://www.mlb.com/news/ featured/baseball-cap-history-and-timeline
Bain, M. (2016, April 26). How the baseball cap went from athletic gear to fashion statement. Quartz. https://qz.com/671831/how-the-baseballcap-went-from-athletic-gear-to-fashion
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