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A Hat that fit like a glove

I can’t describe how my Boston Red Sox 2004 World Series Champions baseball cap smells, but I can tell you what it feels like to smell it. It feels like eating fabulously over-salted French fries at a minor league game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. It feels like pitching in Little League even though no one ever taught you how to pitch, so you’re just kind-of lobbing the ball toward the plate and hoping you don’t clock anybody. It feels like knowing your dad saw you swing and miss for the fifth time that afternoon, scuffling into the dugout, and sticking your face into your cap like it’s a mask and peeking through the eyelets at a spit-out sunflower seed.

After years exposed to sun and dirt, my black cap has stained brown. Its bill is hard and ducklike, distorted from its original shape by mindlessly crunching hands. Sandpapery polyester marches up the front of the cap and, at the top, wraps around a metal button that clutches every seam. A honeycombed mesh constitutes the back two-thirds: “A-Flex” stretch-tech that allows the tag on the sweatband to credibly claim, “ONE SIZE FITS ALL.” That sweatband moistens when pinched, emitting fifteen-year-old sweat. 

I was never a very good thrower or catcher or hitter, but neither were most kids, so for most of my childhood I played on various second-rate teams. During my two-year stint on the Orioles, my dad was third-base coach, waving me home from behind the chalky foul-line. Most of the time, though, he was just another parent, squatting on aluminum bleachers and squinting to spot his kid stranded in center field. 

Whenever we played catch in the backyard, I wore my 2004 Champions cap, peering out from under its bill at a pop-up hurled into a cloudless sky or wincing as that bill dug into my forehead while I dove for a grounder. Toss, catch, toss, catch, toss, miss, run, grab, chuck. All that mattered were the crimson stitches on the ball and the sweaty splotches on my hat.   

One of my first drawings, framed on my parents’ bedroom wall, is a red stick figure (me) observing an elongated purple figure (my dad) as it watches the New York Yankees on television. I only liked the Red Sox because he liked the Yankees. The two teams are rivals like Coke and Pepsi are rivals: the competition continues even though one is much, much better than the other. New York has more championships than any other franchise in American sports, while Boston suffered eighty-six years without a title, a drought that conspicuously began after the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees (upon which trade the ballplayer abruptly flowered into history’s greatest). My mythos begins with Ruth’s curse, shuffles past Buckner’s ball-through-legs, and ends with Schilling’s bloody sock; my dad’s starts with Ruth’s blessing, flutters through Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Jackson, Rodrigues, and Rivera, and culminates with Jeter’s toothpaste-commercial smirk. 

My dad and I felt those histories in Boston’s Fenway Park, where drunk twenty-somethings jeered at his pinstripes, and in Yankee Stadium, where maître d’s told me to use the back entrances of restaurants (the Yankees have both maître d’s and restaurants). Like any good underdog, I yipped taunts in my best Southie accent at the only Yankee fan I knew. In 2004, Boston finally proved it could hit a ball of cork and yarn and horsehide better than anyone else. Even though my taunting devolved into gloating, my dad soon bought me my new favorite hat. 

When I tried out for the seventh-grade squad, I couldn’t hit a single pitch. Other, more intentional indications that I wasn’t the son my dad wanted me to be would follow, but not making that team was the first. Gone were the yips, pop-ups, and Pawtucket salt. Televised baseball suddenly felt like watching paint dry, flake off, and turn to dust.

When I left for college, I brought along my hat and mitt with the vague notion that I might someday toss a ball on the quad with the boys. But freshman me turned out neither to be fratty nor to have “boys,” so the thing met my head only when I went almost a week without showering. (Which, admittedly, was most weeks.) The wrinkled cap now languishes in a plastic bin full of everything else I lug to school but rarely use: dryer sheets, frisbees, printer paper, Star Wars Posters, and a drawstring bag littered with pretzel crumbs. 

But occasionally, when I go back home, my dad and I catch a broadcast of the Little League World Series, a contest between twelve-year-old child-men from across the globe who can do things with bats, balls, and gloves that I can’t do at twenty-two. When Georgia and Hawaii stretch their seven p.m. game past midnight, the two of us sneak looks from behind our phones and watch those kids play like baseball is the only thing that matters. I don’t know what their caps smell like, but I know how they feel when they smell them.  

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