Isn’t it a bit uncomfortable, unless the bill is very soft? But it reminds me of something that confused me as a kid, and I only recently found out. On the cover of Bruce Springsteens “Born in the USA”, he has a red baseball cap folded together sticking up from his backpocket.
This is a bit of an aside, but I recently learned the Spanish expression “a la gorra” which means an event is funded by voluntary donations, similar to the English phrase “passing the hat”. I learned it from an Argentine, which makes me wonder if it is specific to your country.
Aside over, I’ll note that in Africa you’ll see baseball style caps in the captiol cities (at least in Accra, which I am familiar with) due to the influence of American culture. But in the small towns, caps would be pretty rare. Africans have a rich variety of traditional headgear to choose from already.
Maybe it’s obvious but this is because a performer will take off their hat and hand it to the crowd and people will add some coins or cash into it and pass it to the next person. Eventually it makes it way back up to the performer.
These days, of course, it’s common to to have a sign with a QR code that links to their Venmo.
Not really. Africa is huge, traditional head-gear varies wildly. In much of southern Africa, hats are a modern invention. For example, the Himba people (particularly the women) in Namibia traditionally treat their hair and skin with butterfat and red ochre in a sort of dreadlock style to protect them from the sun.
Lesotho has a traditional hat syle, but being a very rainy country, it appears to have served as an umbrella.
It really varies. Zimbabwe has no traditional head-wear, unless you count the copy-cat “turban” style of west Africa, worn as “formal wear” by women. South Africa has the isiZulu style “inverted cone”, often beaded, but that is more like a crown than a usefull hat, and is worn only by women. Lesotho has the distinctive style conical hat, as mentioned, but again, this is often ceremonial. The Ndebele have none, the Shangaan have none (aside, perhaps from headbands for tribal leaders)…
The cradle of mankind (as we like to somewhat pretentiously call ourselves) has assisted our people to live without hats since before hats were invented.
That said, pernicious cultural creep means caps are still fairly common, even though no other hat or head-covering has taken on.
Ever been to an NHL game? Especially during the playoffs, it’s entirely normal for nearly 90% of the crowd to be wearing team jerseys and most of them personalized with their favorite player’s name and number. I even saw a guy at one game with a goalie’s glove. Guess he was hopeful he’d get a puck near him.
ETA: No one wears skates or the typical hockey underwear, though.
Never knew this!
I have no idea, and it seems no one else really does either, although I’ll wager it only dates to the mid-20th C. or so. Navada, the strongly preferred clothing brand for Amakrwala only opened in '69, in any case.
In any case, they only have to wear the jacket and cap for 6 months.
Eh, I wouldn’t be so sure - Khoe-khoen were frequently depicted with hats in period illustrations. Usually a fairly shapeless conical one, possibly felt or skin:
It makes some sense, in that the manager (unlike the coaches in other sports) regularly has occasion to enter the field of play and thus needs to be readily recognizable as a member of his team. Maybe the spikes are to keep him from slipping on the grass? (No idea about the stirrups, though.)
Do the players even wear stirrups anymore? There’s no point with the long uniform pants that have been common for the last 25-30 years. Stirrups were used so that players could wear white socks and still have a team color on their lower leg ( hence the ___Sox names)
Yeah but I think they’re just socks not stirrups. Cleveland’s Carlos Santana is quite fond of them.
For the most part, no. Every once in a while, you’ll still see a player going “old school,” with the pants only down to mid-shin, and wearing the stirrups, but it’s a rarity. As @ZipperJJ 's picture shows, what’s more common now, if a player decides to wear short pants, they just wear team-colored tights or long socks, rather than the traditional stirrups and white sanitary hose.
Pretty much why they are still required to wear uniforms. MLB rules have long stated that any member of a team – including the manager and coaching staff – who sets foot on the field during the game has to be in uniform (though I think medical/training staff are exempted from this). It’s why Connie Mack, the longtime manager and part-owner of the A’s, who wore a suit while managing, didn’t leave the dugout, but instead sent coaches (in uniform) out onto the field when he needed to communicate with his players.
The rule has been relaxed a little bit in recent years, in part due to Terry Francona. Due to circulation issues, Francona preferred to wear a team pullover rather than a jersey, and was told that the rules required him to wear either a jersey or a jacket, but I think that MLB eventually decided that a team pullover would also be acceptable.
IIRC, the NBA had a pretty strict dress code for coaches (pre-COVID). When Don Nelson coached the Golden State Warriors, he preferred to take the court wearing basketball shoes. His reasoning was logical: As a coach, he would have to be on the same floor as the players, and with the dress shoes mandated by the league, he was in danger of slipping, since the floor could be strewn with sweat. I’m pretty sure he got around the dress code by polishing his basketball shoes solid black so at least at a distance, looked like dress shoes.
It looks like it is, a quick google shows “Pasar la gorra” (“passing the hat”) as used in other places but not the specific “a la gorra” expression.
My daughter says they are often called duckbill caps and not stick-ball hat, if someone is being specific, but often just called “hats.”
In Japanese, people will often call them キャップ (kyappu) but often just use the general term 帽子 (booshi) “hat”.
Fewer men wear baseball caps in Japan than in the States.
The most I saw caps was when I used to golf.
I wonder how much of that is due to, well, melanin — as in, do Asians generally need hats less because of darker skin? But then again, Asia has many whitening creams, sunbrellas, full-face sunshields, etc., so maybe not…
No. It’s just a matter of style.
Kids wear baseball style hats all the time and women tend to wear hats more.
Oh, and I need to change what I see.
Old grumpy guys my age tend to not wear hats. Younger men wear them more, but it’s more from skateboarding.
And my son was tell you all the subtle differences in styles of hats, of how flat the brim is, the shape and far more than I ever knew about it.
It comes from a time when managers were mostly also active players on the team. Even if they weren’t in the line up they were ready to go. Connie Mack started as a player and then player manager. When he stopped playing he started wearing a suit as a manager. It was allowed (and maybe still would be allowed) but he couldn’t go on the field for mound visits and such. Baseball is bound by tradition and since it started with managers in uniform it remains that way. As someone stated it has relaxed in recent years with managers wearing team logo products such as hoodies instead of the on the field uniform. It mostly resemble what players usually wear for warmups. It is extremely rare to see Aaron Boone wear the uniform shirt in a game. Some managers still do.
I would fold over the brim into the back of the hat and put it in my side pocket.
That’s a word I’ve always disliked and that’s in my passive but not active vocabulary. I’ve always called baseball caps “Baseballmützen“, which is simply the literal translation.
Baseball managers didn’t start out as coaches. Originally they were simply players who took on managerial jobs such as arranging transportation and housing when on the road. I think the last regular player-manager was Lou Boudreau who played shortstop and led the 1948 Cleveland Indians to the championship over the Boston Braves. (Think about that one.)
I still recall seeing Connie Mack standing in his suit part way up the dugout steps waving a score card. I think he retired in 1950–the year the Phillies won the pennant–and the A’s spent the next five years going downhill until slinking off to KC.
Pete Rose was a player manager for a couple of years in the 80s.
cough Pete Rose cough 
Rose was the most recent one. There were several in the mid-1970s: