NYC baseball cap: Great Bambino

There was baseball before him. And there was baseball after him. And they are not the same sport.

George Herman Ruth arrived in New York in January of 1920, and the city was never the same again. The Yankees acquired him from the Boston Red Sox for $100,000 — a sum so staggering at the time that it became the most talked about transaction in the history of American professional sport and spawned a curse that Red Sox fans spent 86 years believing in with the particular conviction that only genuine suffering can produce. Boston let go of the greatest baseball player who ever lived for the price of a Broadway show loan. New York took him without hesitation and handed him a city.

He rewarded them immediately and completely.

In his first season as a Yankee Babe Ruth hit 54 home runs — more than any entire team in the American League managed that year. The following season he hit 59. In 1927 — the year the Yankees went 110 and 44 and are still considered by many historians the greatest baseball team ever assembled — Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single season, a record that stood for 34 years. He did not just redefine what a baseball player could be. He redefined what a number could mean. Before Ruth a home run was a rare and celebrated event. After Ruth it was the currency of the game.

But the numbers only tell part of the story.

Babe Ruth was not just a baseball player. He was a force of nature that happened to be holding a bat. He was the reason Yankee Stadium was built — the drawing power so extraordinary that the Giants could not share a park with him and the Yankees needed a house worthy of what he was bringing to the field every night. He was the reason 74,000 people showed up for opening day in 1923. He was the reason children across America started playing baseball in vacant lots and cornfields and city parks because if you were a kid in America in the 1920s Babe Ruth was the most vivid proof available that the world contained possibilities beyond anything you had been told to expect.

They called him the Great Bambino. They called him the Sultan of Swat. They called him the Colossus of Clout and the King of Crash and a dozen other names that the sportswriters of the 1920s invented because the existing vocabulary felt insufficient for what they were watching. But the Great Bambino is the one that lasted. The one that carried the full weight of what he was — something mythological dressed in pinstripes, standing in the left handed batters box at Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx with a bat that looked too small for the swings he took with it and a grin that suggested he already knew how this was going to end.

Number 3. Retired in 1948 while he was still alive. Never worn by a Yankee since. Never will be.

He played his last game in 1935. He died in 1948. And in the 76 years since his death not a single conversation about the greatest baseball player who ever lived has ended without his name being the first one said.

This hat is for everyone who understands that some legends do not belong to their era. They belong to the game itself. They belong to the city that gave them the stage. And they belong to everyone who has ever picked up a bat and swung for something bigger than a base hit.

Made for the locals. Inspired by the legends.

• 100% cotton twill

• Unstructured, 6-panel, low-profile

• Pre-curved visor with 6-row stitching

• White embroidery 

• Adjustable Velcro® (hook-and-loop) closure

• Matching undervisor and sweatband

• Head circumference: 22.83″ (58 cm)

• Blank product sourced from Myanmar