There are between 40 and 50 million baseball caps sold in the United States alone each and every year. Only a few thousand of those caps are worn by professional ballplayers with the rest going to nonprofessional players, fans, and fashion enthusiasts. It is estimated that a full two-thirds of the caps go to non-athletes. Just a few short decades ago, this was a fashion that didn 't exist. Not much further back, the caps did not exist at all.
Baseball as we know it has only been around since the mid-1800s, and the fashion that accompanied it was not created until the late 1800s when teams began to develop into semi-pro and then professional teams. It is rumored that the first ball caps in the modern style were …show more content…
The major market was not athletes, but truck drivers and farmers. In fact, if you saw a baseball cap in the 1970s you might have even referred to it as a "trucker 's hat".
As with most fashion explosions, they can be traced back to Hollywood. The story of the baseball cap is no exception. This time, an unlikely Hollywood fashion star would bring two elements of clothing into the mainstream: ball caps and Hawaiian shirts. The star: Tom Selleck. Selleck drove a Ferrari and wore Hawaiian shirts with a Detroit Tigers baseball cap topping his masculine good looks. Selleck was a sex symbol and he wore a baseball cap, therefore, everyone needed to wear a baseball cap. Overnight, Hollywood royalty did just that, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today, the style of the baseball cap is basically the same as is was 150-years ago, though there have been many changes in materials, colors, and uses. There is far less wool and much more plastic in modern ball caps. Additionally, the colors have changed and there are many styles of cap backs from adjustable to