Just a Plain Black Baseball Cap

It’s just a plain, structured, medium-crown, black baseball cap.

No logo, no team name, and kind of boring.

And that’s the point.

But let’s deconstruct this a little.

It has to be black, the same way my knitted longshoreman’s cap is black.

It also can’t be boxy, narrow, have a large visor, or be made of felt or foam. I don’t like ones with plastic mesh because they give off a trucker or cracker vibe. And foam has a hipster aesthetic.

I’d rather get a sunburn or heat stroke than wear a Von Dutch one. 

An overly large-brimmed hat is too ghetto. One with the brim angled to the side is trying too hard.

And what’s with keeping the round gold sticker on the brim?

Do I need to tell everyone who cares to look that I just bought a new baseball hat?

Not only are the shape, material, and color important, but so is how you wear it.

Unlike some of my male twenty-something students, I don’t wear my cap backwards unless there are severe winds.

Even how high it sits on your head is a decision, not an accident.

I guess I have a lot of rules about baseball caps.

I don’t have a favorite sports team, city, or country. And I don’t like wearing a brand name blazoned across my forehead.

And most importantly, I like to remain anonymous when I’m out in public and not advertise my loyalties through what I wear.

Wear a New York Yankees hat outside the United States, and people will assume you’re American.

I want to fly below the radar.

No team. No city. No country.

Just a black hat.

And yet I have lots of opinions about what that hat should look like.

I didn’t really think about all these rules until a couple of years ago.

We were in Turin, Italy, and I thought I had lost my baseball cap.

I spent a considerable amount of time retracing my steps to find it. When I couldn’t, I started looking for a replacement.

Not because black baseball caps are hard to find. There are thousands of them.

The problem was finding one I wanted to wear.

Luckily, my wife found my cap where we were staying.

That’s when I realized how many rules I had for something as simple as a black baseball cap.

The cap cost about twenty dollars. It was replaceable.

But I wasn’t willing to buy just any black baseball cap.

You would think I was choosing a house, a partner, a career, or some other big-ticket item.

After my wife found the hat, I took a handful of photos of it and the manufacturing label, in case I lost it again.

Which I did.

This summer, I lost it on the floor of a rental car in Bordeaux.

Luckily, I had the photos.

So, once again I started looking for the same (not a similar) one.

It turns out that the only place that appears to manufacture and sell it is in Argentina.

And so starts another adventure.

That’s another story.

Most of us probably have a favorite shirt, jacket, or pair of shoes. Something that looks completely unremarkable to everyone else but somehow isn’t replaceable to you.

You may not even realize you have rules about these things until something disappears and you discover that “almost the same” isn’t good enough.

And yet, apparently, there is only one black baseball cap in the world that’s mine.