My daughter, a budding young Doper, noticed that the underside of the brim of all of our baseball caps are green and wanted to know: Why is this?
Just anecdotal, but of my 4 baseball caps, none have a green underside.
Underbrim colors vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. The hat I’m wearing now has an underbrim the same color as the rest of the hat, my New Era 5150 cap has a gray underbrim and I haven’t seen a green underbrim hat in a while.
Here’s a little nugget of info from ESPN’s uniform expert, Paul Lukas:
Most baseball cap brims are dark colored to eliminate refelective glare.
I thought it was for the same reason accountants wear green eyeshades. Cuts down glare and soothes the eye.
Does it also have to do with glare/reflection from green grass?
Actually, the underside of most Major League Baseball caps is a light gray. A few are green.
For a long time, they were all green. One team decided to try light gray, and their fielding percentage improved that year. So almost everybody else followed suit.
Nice link, BrianJedi! Thanks.
FWIW, all of our Pony League caps, of which were getting a nice collection, have green underbrims*. Which isn’t surprising since I’m sure that they all come from the same distributor. My assumption is that they are still green in a carry over from the good old days. And here in sunny Florida we get plenty of bright, glare filled days and afternoons. I’m surprised none of the coaches has gone to gray to give his team an edge. Since Tampa teams win a lot of national Pony league championships, maybe everyone else should switch back to green.
*Had I known this was the technical term I could have initially found some stuff.