MLB caps, ranked

[CS85]

 

30.  Colorado Rockies:  God, just look at this crap.  The bottom serif of the C barely fits into the R, and that's before you get into the random purple tumors swelling up from inside the hat.  Colorado deserves better.  If you made the purple the same silver as the letters, this wouldn't be half bad.  Still boring, but not terrible.  As it is?  It's Zed.  And Zed's dead, baby.  Zed's dead.

 

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29.  Miami Marlins:  The Marlins caps have virtually always been trash, and while the latest iteration of their branding is fairly decent, the cap looks like something you'd get at walmart.  There's far, far too much going on, and every time I look at it I'm reminded of these awful Batman Forever promotional hats from the mid-90s.

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28.  Tampa Bay Rays:  Bless the poor Rays, who try their damnedest to scrub themselves clean of their original Chumbawumba Kid Vid X-Games look, but ultimately are down here having a pillow fight with the other dullards who gleefully stroll the aisles of Bland Designs Inc., licking the ashtrays clean.

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27.  Texas Rangers:  Hope you didn't fall asleep just from looking at this one.  The actual Texas Rangers, unlike the baseball Texas Rangers, have an interesting and colorful history, so naturally this dumbass franchise built their branding around a pokey T.  No badges, no flavor, just some pokey letters and a gold-derned flag of Texas, because by gawd that's all we need.  Forget the fascinating history of the biggest continental state in the country, boys - ride this biotch red, white, and blue, and ask yerselves...what would Nolan Ryan or George W. Bush do?  Come find out inside our billion dollar polebarn - now with air conditioning!

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26.  Arizona Diamondbacks:  I'll give this to the D-Backs - they know what they are.  They seem to be in a kinship trance with their "Flowers For Algernon" hockey cousins, dimly stumbling into a brick look after wearing Blurple The Tealish Clown garb for much of their first few years.  Since then they saw the new Tron a few too many times, and now are residing comfortably in the "we're safely minor league" territory.  Good on ya, Arizona.

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25.  Cincinnati Reds:  The wishbone C is traditional and usually pretty decent on sports garb, and it makes sense for Ye Olde Reds, who have been around since Ug hit Gar with the bone after the Monolith fell.  And yet I put the Reds down here for two reasons:  1 - the black drop shadow should be a criminal offense on this logo, and 2 - the black button/bill of the road cap is utter sacrilege.  Let this cap be a wishbone C and little to nothing else with red everywhere else, and poof - you're moving way, way up, Cincy.  Are you red and navy?  Red and black?  Are there pinstripes?  Will this be worn with a vest?  What about the bill?  Wait - why does the bill have color?  How about just red?  Like, only red?  Just figure it out, for the love of God.

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24.  Milwaukee Brewers:  We heard you, fans!  We're finally going back to the beloved ball-in-glove logo!  Wait, what does that have to do with brewing beer?  Oh yeah, not a goddamn thing.  Here, we'll throw the barrelman on the sleeve, you happy now?  No?  Wait, you want the blue to be royal blue?  Ack, leave me alone, I'm just a brand!  I personally have never been a fan of the logo, despite how clever it may be on the surface, and yeah, it's better than the previous cap, but not by a heckuva lot.  Beer, beer brewing, and Milwaukee are all generally cool, historic things, so why die on the hill of this wonky Shocked Pikachu logo? 

 

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23.  Kansas City Royals:  It looks like the original artist had a piping bag and had to get creative not to waste the icing.  The Royals walk a very strange line with their cap, equally traversing the Void of Boring on one side, the Chasm of Nostalgia on the other.  The end result is an old-looking logo that is very dull, and so here you go, KC, huddled here in the 20's with a freshly-spooged Lewinsky dress that hopefully George Brett will use to sop up his watery lobster s. 

 

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22.  New York Mets:  In the 1960s, the Mets had a better idea.  The N and Y were nice and stretched out, everybody got room to breathe, and life was good.  Then in the early 90's, somebody used the Transform tool to squeeze it all together, and ever since the Mets logo has looked thin and tiny on their caps.  Regardless of that, the lettering sucks.  It looks like somebody threw a grappling hook around a wrought-iron fence.  It looks like a sloth is playing an accordion or reading a book.  It's incompetent, man - incompetent!

 

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21.  Baltimore Orioles:  I'm not adverse to the cartoon bird.  Hell, I'm not even adverse to the cartoon bird wearing a cap!  But I am adverse to a cartoon bird wearing a cap that's got a different logo on it.  I get that you don't want to create an infinite loop - having a bird wearing a cap of the cap that it's on could destroy the space-time continnuum - but what the hell, guys?  The Oriole's looking at me like, "haha, I'm totally ing with you, aren't I?"  and he's correct.  The hat itself is fun, and I love the colors, but make the hat solid black or put a blank white panel on it, something to where I'm not forced to think about this. 

 

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20.  Seattle Mariners:  I want to put this cap higher, because the Mariners colors are so damned good.  There's simply far, far too much being done.  You have an S with heavy serifs and two strokes under a shaded compass rose that's intermingled with a baseball.  The points of the compass go over one part of the S but not the other.  The threads on the ball are barely able to be present.  Seattle's got so much damned potential with their brand, their color scheme, and they're the only team in the American League that has a city name starting with S, and the only team in baseball that could use a stand alone S.  Instead they've been churning out this busy fella for years now, and while it's not the worst thing ever, it's hard to stomach.  It's the KFC Double Down of MLB caps - delicious, but full of empty calories.

 

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19.  Houston Astros:  I used to like this hat a lot more.  There's a lot of simple goodness going on, subtle detail in the stitching, great vibrant orange with great contrast for the H.  But I won't lie, it's been moved down this far almost exclusively due to its association with cheating, -heel transgressions.  Like the stadium sponsor from years back, this is essentially Enron all over again.  I can't help but see scandal and betrayal of the sport when I look at this damned cap.   What a goddamned shame.  For everyone.

 

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18.  Pittsburgh Pirates:  I want to like this cap a lot more, I really do.  It's simple, straightforward, and hard-boiled in league history, but there's something about black and yellow that I have never liked as a color pairing.  It's quintessential Pittsburgh, so I give it full credit for fitting right in with the color scheme of the city flag and all that, yet it feels almost stubbornly empty as a cap.  Pirates have a wealth of elements that could make for kickass cap logos - they even branded themselves on black canvas all throughout their brief and bloody heyday, so to trot out a pokey yellow P feels like I'm getting cheated.

 

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17.  Cleveland Indians:  The Indians are obviously still in a long simmer for figuring out just what the hell they're going to do with themselves, and going back to a hulking block C was probably the best course of action in terms of logo lifeboats.  It's an element away - be it a feather or a spider-web, whatever iconography they want to harness in the future - from being much higher on my list.  As it is, I'm harboring it here in the slow cooker with a couple bay leaves.

 

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16.  San Francisco Giants:  I've never really known how to interpret the interlocking SF.  Is it meant to be constructed of human bones?  Was it simply drawing from the baseball lettering of the times?  Somebody enlighten me.  It's a lovely logo, but would be better if the F was a slightly different shade of orange or even white.  Plus the last bit of the S is about to tap the F on its shoulder. 

 

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15.  Chicago White Sox:  The ever-frustrating White Sox are here squarely in the center of things.  They have arguably the best color scheme in the major leagues, and yet their hat perplexes the hell out of me.  I love that it takes up a nice bit of space on the front, and on the field this cap looks fantastic, but it needs simplified.  This logo from the '30s (or a derivative of it) is infinitely better, by miles and miles, and would rocket the White Sox up this list, but instead they're going to ride the Big Hurt Cascading Calligraphy forever.  Why?

 

 

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14.  Chicago Cubs:  It hurts to put my Cubbies down here, but I feel like for all it's basebally, summer wonderfulness, it's ultimately a small circle with a chunk taken out.  It's a bicycle tire your weird 12-year old son cut up with your machete collection.  It's an onion ring somebody bit off of before asking if you wanted to share. The old logo with the bear is one of my favorites, and a modern interpretation of that would be fantastic.  It needs to be a little bit bigger, have one more very simple element, something.  It's still a great cap, but I can't put it any higher.  Eddie Vedder can kiss my ass.

 

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13.  Philadelphia Phillies:  Look, nobody knows what a Phillie is.  If I had to guess, it'd be a vodka-smelling guy in an Eagles jersey hurling batteries at special olympians, but you can't put that on a cap (or can you?).  The Phillies cap is nearly as boring as hell, but thanks to a few whipped cream flourishes and a nice blue cap button, it has a nice toehold in the upper crust. 

 

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12.  Toronto Blue Jays:  The thing I feel more people should appreciate about the Blue Jays cap is how much of the front panel it takes up.  So many teams in the MLB have these wimpy, dinky cap logos that look like they're Montana Charlie knock-offs sold next to splintery back-scratchers and street corn.  The Jays, however, slap that big-ass bird and the maple leaf up there with big dick energy, flipping the bat and blaring the goal horn.  It's a little busy, sure, and the blue on the bird seems lighter than the cap itself, but screw it.  Good hat.  Rob Ford probably had*** a slew of these bad boys in his closet, fashionably hiding some burnt spoons and blackened hitters, whistling O Canada out of his butthole while sucking on the exhaust pipe of a Vespa. 

 

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11.  Washington Nationals:  I love this logo, and it's such a shame that, well...you know.  The letter W is such a big, bold letter that has all sorts of avenues for branding, particularly on a cap, and I feel as though people would like this logo/hat a lot more if the, uh, obvious, er...well...SCREW IT IT LOOKS LIKE WALGREENS, OK? 

 

 

 

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10.  Minnesota Twins:  Hey, when did the Twins win the World Series?  I see they have hats with a gold stroke now, so congrats to them!  Wait, what's that?  They haven't won a title since the 90s, and the gold is there just because?  Oh, you crafty Twins, marring a perfectly great logo with some needless trim.

 

 

I love this hat without that gold trash.  The Twin Cities emblem is infinitely better than anything, and I do mean anything that the Twins have on their uniforms (I can get with the handshake twins, but it should never be more than a sleeve patch).  Let's hope that none of the cops that killed George Floyd get the interlocking TC prison-tatted on their necks and ruin one of the best caps in the game.  Haha, what am I saying - they won't ever see a day in prison.  HIT THE MUSIC, BOYS

 

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9.  LA Dodgers:  I begrudgingly put the Dodgers cap this high, only because it's the perfect LA logo and can never be anything else.  It's one of the best caps out there with the exception of the awful white button.  This button should be red, you stupid bastards, red!  It looks like a tiny communion wafer or macaron, maybe an altoid, is plopped up there, ruining an otherwise iconic lid.  Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez wore this with great pride during his baseball career.  Was a shame he got wrapped up in all the pills and the lifestyle, but at least we can always look back on his epic stealing of home plate.

 

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8.  LA Angels:  Pump your fist, Zach, the Angels cap is elite   .  It would be a bit better if the depth was toned down a bit, but this hat kicks ass.  It does kind of make me think of this, however:

 

 

...but hey, that's okay!  That's more of a problem with me than with the cap.

 

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7.  San Diego Padres:  The Padres cap is just fantastic.  Brown and gold is a powerhouse combo, and the S/D are chained together in all the right ways.  It's imperfect - namely the spacing and serifs are juuuuuust a hair off - but it sits nice and fat on the front of the cap, doesn't have any other noise to distract you, and is essentially optimized.  All that's left is having an alternate jersey with "DADDIES" across the front and we'll have won. 

 

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6.  Atlanta Braves:  There's something about the Braves weird A that I've always had a soft spot for.  It does kind of look like a melting towel hanger or three smears of toothpaste, but it's pretty as hell on a baseball cap.  Pair it with the red bill and a red button, and it's gorgeous.  It also isn't fair if you compare it to the rest of Atlanta Sports.  The Hawks and Falcons both have inferior logos, cycling through new looks over the years with little to no success.  Meanwhile the Braves are still wearing the same crap they wore when John Rocker was trying to win "Who's The Biggest Racist" well before it became trendy to say such things with the appropriate qanon hashtags. 

 

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5.  Boston Red Sox:  One can't help but look at this hat and think of Ted Williams, David Ortiz, Carl Yastrzemski, Pedro Martinez, Curt Schilling's bloody sock, and coming back from 0-3 to beat the Yankees.  However, we also can't help but think of clam chowdah, pahk the kah in hawvahd yahd, The Departed, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Fever Pitch, and Curt Schilling's video game company.  It also looks like two differently shaped 3s mushed together. 

 

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4.  Detroit Tigers:  This is so frustrating.  I'd probably have the Tigers cap be 2, arguably even 1 if the logo was bigger.  Just a hair.  Use the space!  Get swole!  Let me see every flourish and marking of the old english letter, don't make it the size of a pretzel bite!  "Here you go, son!  Enjoy your Detroit Tigers cap!"  "Oh boy, Pop!  I can't wait to see the logo!"

 

(I apologize to the ghost of Ty Cobb for using a gif featuring a non-white, but if it's any consolation, Ty, he was born in Detroit)

 

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3.  Oakland A's:  God, I love this cap.  It's wonderfully imperfect.  You have this stylized A with all kinds of random flourishes and hooks, an apostrophe that doesn't make much sense, and an S in a sans-serif font.  It's a hot mess, but it's arguably the prettiest cap under the sunshine.  We gotta give Oakland something.  Their NFL teams keep leaving, and their old NBA team won't be caught dead there now that they have a nice toilet to play in. 

 

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2.  St. Louis Cardinals:  I feel ill doing this, but I have no choice.  The Cardinals hat is absolutely stellar.  It should never change (give or take a wee adjustment), and all we can do as a society is hope their fans stop being buffoonish twats, bigots, and overall elitist imbeciles.  Let's all doff our StL caps and pour out a Bud Heavy for the fallen:  Darryl Kile, who perished because his weak heart couldn't handle a name with that extra R; Oscar Tavarez, who killed himself and his girlfriend when the passion of the Cardinal Way inspired him to drive drunk; and Josh Hancock, who too felt the untouchable power of the Best Fans In Baseball course through his veins, along with a .157 BAC. 

 

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1.  New York Yankees:  I mean c'mon.  it had to be the top.  If we had to put some sports iconography into a box to give to aliens, a Yankees cap would probably be enough to represent all of Major League Baseball.  No, you can't wear it with facial hair, and yes, you have to feel like a total douchebag when you wear it around, but it's legend.  Babe Ruth donned this bad boy with pride as he shoved no fewer than 18 hot dogs into his gaping, fetid maw, all while slopping his Andre The Giant wang in and among a stack of cheese-smelling hookers covered in cigar ashes.  Derek Jeter totally wore his NYY cap while handing out post-herpification gift baskets.  Mickey Mantle, for a fact, wore his Yankees cap while writing a 5-star review for a mid-game blowjob.  It is lordly, kingly, and unrivaled at #1 with a bullet (and a penicillin shot).

[DC in Da House w/o a Doubt]

Great list, the commentary was spot on as always.

 

About my beloved Natties, the red home hat has become criminally underused.  I don't even get how they can consider it the primary hat anymore.  They wore it 30 times last year in a 162 game season and 17 playoff games, and will wear it 0 times this year in a 60 game season.  30 times out of 239 games!  The Nats are Problem Child #1 when it comes to alternate hat overload. 

 

Meanwhile the away hat was worn 101 times in 2019 (including the playoffs)

 

https://www.sportslogos.net/uniforms/list_by_team/2019578/Washington_Nationals_2019_Uniform_Tracker_Game-By-Game/   

 

[PlayGloria]

Soooo you call Cards fans bigots and blah blah blah and then crack jokes about players that have passed. I get your a cubs fan, so it's all probably in jest... but still. Gross. Ruins an otherwise good well thought out list.

[sky1324]

Excellent commentary, but your placement for the O's is just wrong. That cap is a top 5 cap, easily, it's got all the charm you could want out of a baseball cap. It's classic, it's a little goofy, and the fact that the bird is wearing a different cap is just one of those quirks you find in baseball (though it would be better if he was wearing a B). 

[dont care]

16 hours ago, QCS said:

Excellent commentary, but your placement for the O's is just wrong. That cap is a top 5 cap, easily, it's got all the charm you could want out of a baseball cap. It's classic, it's a little goofy, and the fact that the bird is wearing a different cap is just one of those quirks you find in baseball (though it would be better if he was wearing a B). 

You mean a quirk you find nowhere else in major league baseball. It’s a fun hat but it’s very minor league.

[BBTV]

...

 

Nevermind.  BFIB!

[BBTV]

As for the list, curious why Cleveland is rated significantly higher than the 'boring' teams, when it's arguably the most boring of all of them.

[DoubleStraps]

My dude, Rob Ford is no longer among the living.

[CS85]

3 hours ago, BringBackTheVet said:

As for the list, curious why Cleveland is rated significantly higher than the 'boring' teams, when it's arguably the most boring of all of them.

I like their colors.

 

29 minutes ago, DoubleStraps said:

My dude, Rob Ford is no longer among the living.

 

Oh.  Well, uh

[LMU]

23 hours ago, CherryMX said:

4.  Detroit Tigers:  This is so frustrating.  I'd probably have the Tigers cap be 2, arguably even 1 if the logo was bigger.  Just a hair.  Use the space!  Get swole!  Let me see every flourish and marking of the old english letter, don't make it the size of a pretzel bite!  "Here you go, son!  Enjoy your Detroit Tigers cap!"  "Oh boy, Pop!  I can't wait to see the logo!"

 

(I apologize to the ghost of Ty Cobb for using a gif featuring a non-white, but if it's any consolation, Ty, he was born in Detroit)

And yet they had it right in 2018.

[Krz]

Wow. You didn’t have to come at the rangers that hard lol.

[CS85]

1 hour ago, LMU said:

And yet they had it right in 2018.

 

What a bunch of bullcrap. 

[Jer15]

1 hour ago, Krz said:

Wow. You didn’t have to come at the rangers that hard lol.

I disagree. 

 

He came at them the right amount.

[DDR]

On 8/20/2020 at 12:49 PM, CherryMX said:

 

 

2.  St. Louis Cardinals:  I feel ill doing this, but I have no choice.  The Cardinals hat is absolutely stellar.  It should never change (give or take a wee adjustment), and all we can do as a society is hope their fans stop being buffoonish twats, bigots, and overall elitist imbeciles.  Let's all doff our StL caps and pour out a Bud Heavy for the fallen:  Darryl Kile, who perished because his weak heart couldn't handle a name with that extra R; Oscar Tavarez, who killed himself and his girlfriend when the passion of the Cardinal Way inspired him to drive drunk; and Josh Hancock, who too felt the untouchable power of the Best Fans In Baseball course through his veins, along with a .157 BAC. 

 

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Also, you're a little low on the White Sox. It's iconic! Good list and breakdown overall though. 

 

 

[Ark]

3 hours ago, LMU said:

And yet they had it right in 2018.

 

They went back for a reason.

[BBTV]

Yeah the White Sox cap transcended sports and became a cultural institution, at least for the first 10 years of its existence.  When I first got cable, the first music video I saw was Dre Day which features the line "got my chrome to the side of his White Sox hat".  It'll never be as omnipresent as the Yankees hat, and isn't seen nearly as often now as it was 20 years ago, but it's still a damn-fine-looking cap.  So fine, that it's almost a curse - they can't really ever change it now.  Ironic, since changing every two years used to be their gimmick.

[-Akronite-]

Overall pretty fun list! Agreed that White Sox deserved a better ranking I'm firmly on team BIG D.

 

As a Cleveland fan, I'd say the 8 caps right behind the Block C are all clearly superior. I'd also argue that the gold stroke on the Twins hat is a far worse crime than the Reds including a simple black shadow (that wouldn't even bother me if not for the black bill on the road).

 

Oh, and the Yankees don't HAVE to be number 1 for a ranking list. It's certainly the most popular and iconic, but that's not the same as best. That said, it's your list so whatever.

[BC985]

As a hat guy, I want to engage in this topic, but your treatment of the Cardinals is gross. Taking issue with drunk driving is understandable, but is unrelated to this topic. Mocking Darryl Kile’s death is inexcusable. You aren’t funny or clever. Being a fan of a rival does not make it ok either.  

[BadSeed84]

41 minutes ago, BC985 said:

As a hat guy, I want to engage in this topic, but your treatment of the Cardinals is gross. Taking issue with drunk driving is understandable, but is unrelated to this topic. Mocking Darryl Kile’s death is inexcusable. You aren’t funny or clever. Being a fan of a rival does not make it ok either.  

 

He's just being comedic, I didn't take offense to his quibs about Phillies fans (cause no one likes us and we don't care).

[BC985]

11 minutes ago, EddieJ1984 said:

 

He's just being comedic, I didn't take offense to his quibs about Phillies fans (cause no one likes us and we don't care).

There’s a line at mocking someone’s death and he crossed it. That’s not comedic it is crass.