Digging through the archive
As I mentioned on the last couple episodes of Throwing Bagels (see the YouTube highlights here and here), I have managed to accumulate over 100 caps over the course of my life - 129, to be exact - which includes 70 New York Mets caps. It started innocently enough with a corduroy Mets hat that was given to me when I was very young - probably 8 or 9 or somewhere around there - and then I added a handful of adjustable Mets hats in the early-mid 90s. Unfortunately, I was finding that some of the adjustable hats were too small for me, or the plastic band in the back would split, forcing me to wrap it up with some athletic tape so that it would stay on my head.
Sometime during my senior year in high school (1996), I purchased my first ever fitted Mets hat, size 7 5/8. It fit really well, and now, I no longer had to worry about whether a hat would fit my head - as long as I got caps in that hat size, I was (almost) guaranteed to have a good-fitting hat. And since a cap was far cheaper than a jersey, I decided to start building a cap collection whenever the Mets would come out with something new.
At that time, I also made the decision to go to SUNY Oswego, so I started buying a few adjustable Oswego caps here and there. Anyway, back to the Mets caps, I wasn't really expecting to add a whole lot of fitted caps - after all, the Mets had pretty much been wearing the same all-blue cap with the orange interlocking NY logo since the team's debut 34 years prior. Little did I know that the cap I bought (blue cap, blue button on top, blue bill) would mark the end of an era.
Starting in 1997, blue Mets caps started sporting the orange button on top, and the team's first-ever alternate cap was introduced - a white cap with a blue bill. That white alternate lasted only one season, as the team replaced the white with black, and kept the blue bill, in 1998, and then, in 1999, the team added the all-black cap with the blue Mets logo outlined in white, and the orange dropshadow behind it. (Check out the evolution of the Mets hat here!)
So now I was rapidly adding caps to my collection - blue caps, white caps, black caps, caps with various patches on the side, and all kinds of different Mets hats not necessarily worn on the field. Not to mention caps from other teams - an Oswego hockey national championship hat, two Giants Super Bowl champions hats, a Jets Cortland training camp hat, a Staten Island Yankees cap (shhhh, keep that between us!) and many others. After dismissing it initially, I eventually warmed up to, and then purchased - on sale, of course - the 'City Connect' Mets cap, which made its debut early in the 2024 season. I'm sure there will be many new Mets caps down the road, and I look forward to seeing what else will be making it into my collection.
It was kind of fun, actually, to dig around in the 'archive', by which I mean a trunk and several storage bags full of caps, because there are some great memories tied to many of those caps. (The 2000 World Series caps, maybe not so much…)
Below is a gallery of some of the caps in my collection - it includes some of the hats I mentioned above, plus a few surprises!
