The only difference I see here is that baseball players extended the brim a bit to help keep the sun out of their eyes. It even has the button on top.
I used to get reading material from the grandparents in Britain when I was a lad, and as I recall all the ripping yarns about life in boarding school included these multicolour caps in what i assume was school colours.
So is this sort of headwear considered to hoitty-toitty upper class fop stuff in the Olde Country?
The epitome of snootiness is the Eton Wall Game and it does begin with the tossing of caps. But Their current caps seem to have long bills.
IIRC from all of the old timey baseball info I’ve consumed, all old timey baseball caps had a smaller bill than they do now. Like Alice’s buddies had. Baseball was in full swing (heyo!) by the time Alice was written in 1865.
Indeed. This is a picture of Cy Young, one of the best pitchers in baseball in the late 19th and early 20th century (and the namesake of the annual awards for the best pitchers in the majors). You can see that the bill of his cap is much smaller than they would be, even a couple of decades later.
My point would be that the hat design is simple and functional, and English upper class schools would be unlikely to have copied a design from some obscure American game. Parallel evolution?
I find assorted pics of cricketeers wearing something similar, with the smaller brims, but many of the pictures online I perused don’t have dates attached. However, pre-1900 the hat seemed to be around, if not common.
Cricketers used to wear similar caps and so did schoolboys (though if you actually wore one in the schoolyard it would be snatched off your head and used as a football after about thirty seconds)
But to return to the OP - it seems to me the cap is universally popular worldwide because commercial interests in the USA appropriated it as an advertising medium, to put their logos on the cap instead of team identifiers. And then American culture has spread the concept world-wide.
I would say they’re popular worldwide because they’re simply practical, providing protection for the wearer against both sun and rain. Even police organisations and militaries around the world have adopted baseball caps as part of their standard equipment.
The same could be said about t-shirts, but I’m not sure either baseball caps or t-shirts would predominate the way they do if each wasn’t so well suited for doubling as a billboard. I mean, what percentage of those items don’t have anything printed on them? Far less than half. That branding and messaging is often the only thing you will remember about a stranger you met briefly. Oddly, that is the number one way people individualize themselves through clothing.
I admit, one reason baseball caps are popular is that so many of them are given away for free. But still, if they weren’t practical (how many other brimmed hats can be stuffed into a pocket or backpack?), people wouldn’t wear them
That said, while the bucket hat (and its Israeli variation, the Tembel hat) don’t have much of a brim, the boonie hat does, and is probably the most practical warm-weather hat in the world. I wish they were more popular among civilians.
I guess somebody wears them in Spain, but I can’t remember ever having seen one being worn by a local. Haven’t lived in Spain for over 40 years, perhaps they do now. But if I saw someone wearing a baseball cap in Spain I would think: tourist.
Newsboy hat - I used to wear something like this a lot years ago - same brim as a baseball hat, more coverage. Also scrunchable, I could put it in a pocket - but, no advertising.
