Patriotic Caps Worn by MLB Teams this July 4th

Major League Baseball and New Era have unveiled the special patriotic “Stars and Stripes” caps which all MLB clubs will be wearing this 4th of July.

The designs feature a blue crown with red bill for National League teams and the opposite, a red crown with blue bill, for the American League. The exceptions are the AL’s Tampa Bay Rays who will instead wear blue at their request to better match their colour scheme (Logic!) and not-USA’s Toronto Blue Jays who will wear their red maple leaf BP cap (Logic?).

Here’s a look at all 30 club designs… it’s your regular MLB template city!

2014 AL 4th of July Caps MLB — American League 2014 “Stars and Stripes” Caps

National League 2014 Stars and Stripes Caps — National League 2014 “Stars and Stripes” Caps

It’d be cool if they left the designs up to each team to come up with themselves (if they even want a special design at all) but… y’know… they don’t.

Of the non-Canadian teams, most of the designs are pretty standard, they feature each teams regular home cap logo (except for Cleveland and Houston) stripped of all colours and placed on a blue or red crown. Behind the logo is a slanted star which contains a portion of the U.S. flag.

Cleveland is using their road cap logo because, well, obviously they aren’t going to use Chief Wahoo (their usual home cap logo) on such a design (although they’ve tried to in the past).

Houston is using their BP cap logo as their actual cap logo already has a star in the background… what’s unclear is why they didn’t just use the “H” without the star to place on this star. What we have instead is an Inception-style tunnel of stars.

Toronto is going with their Canadian themed alternate BP caps which… doesn’t make a lick of sense. I understand that they’re Canadian, but this is a day celebrating the United States and the Jays will be playing in Oakland that afternoon. If they have to wear something special then they should be wearing a design celebrating both nations, or just a simple “Happy 4th of July guys!” US flag patch on the side.

In reality the Blue Jays should be treating the holiday the same way American teams playing in Canada on July 1st do, which is by doing absolutely nothing special at all (I should note I have been trying to get the Milwaukee Brewers to wear a Canadian flag patch on their cap for this years July 1st game but… so far, no luck). The Phillies once wore a Canadian flag on the side of their caps on July 1 in 2006.

These aren’t your standard in-game New Era caps, they’re actually the “Diamond Era 59Fifty” batting practice caps – basically they’re made of a lighter material and they have a diamond pattern in the crown.

Detailed look at the fabric used for the crown of the caps

This will be the 7th season the league has had all teams wear a league-mandated-template design celebrating the anniversary of a nation all about personal freedoms. A look back at the previous designs in the fancy collage below: