Daily Geek-Out: World Series Jays

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Daily Geek-Out: 1989 Road Jays

By Tom Jackson
Cap Geek

My weekends have been busy! I missed last Sunday’s Geek-Out, didn’t get a chance to post yesterday. To make up for that, I’ll post two today!

And, yes, more of the May Jays Days.

Now with WHITE-thread embroidery!

My first one for the day: The 1989 road jays cap. Like the original Jays game cap, this one is all poly — no wool — and features the  gloriously complex (almost to he point of convoluted) bird profile with tiny maple leaf inside the baseball. It was also worn before MLB put the “batter-man” logo on the back. Differences are obvious: The entire crown is royal blue instead of the original  white front.

And as a result, this logo needed a bunch more thread to be complete.

Since so much of that original Jays logo involves white — large portions of the bird’s face, as well as the whole baseball — which had been filled with the white panel. But this cap, having a blue cap, had to fill in all those spaces with white embroidery thread. And since the Jays would soon make this particular style their full-time cap, home and road, the non-embroidered white parts became a thing of the past with the 1989 home caps. (The white-front-paneled caps supposedly stuck around through 1993 — the year the Jays won their second straight World Series — I seem to recall them going full-blue pretty much from 1990 on.)

Nothing on the back!

I bought this cap at 0ne of the baseball apparel shops outside Wrigley Field back in 1989. I was working for a Chicago-area ad agency and was there in early spring — before the season started — supervising a photo shoot for a client, which had created the doors and frames for what were then the brand new luxury boxes. I had arrived at Wrigley without a cap, but believed I would need one to shield my bald head from the early springtime sun.

At least, that was my excuse for heading into the shop and buying the nifty new cap.

Turned out the skies were mostly cloudy, which actually helped create a balanced exposure for our photos, as we had both indoor and outdoor subject matter in each shot.

Turned out to be a highly successful shoot, pleased the clients, and left me with another valued addition to my growing cap collection.

Next Geek-Out: The World Series-era cap!