Oakland Athletics Road

Being a fan of the Arizona Diamondbacks, I have found myself half-way rooting for the Oakland Athletics over the past half decade, and the reason is due to the recent trade history that these two teams have had. Over the past several seasons, the Diamondbacks have made many trades and other than the Detroit Tigers, the Oakland Athletics have beefed up their roster with many players from the Diamondbacks starters and farm team players; such as the massive deal that sent Dan Haren to Arizona and Brett Anderson and Carlos Gonzalez to Oakland. Just this past offseason a 5 player swap occurred between the two teams which sent Trevor Cahill and Craig Breslow to Arizona, and blue chip prospect Jarrod Parker, along with Collin Cowgill, and Ryan Cook went to Oakland.

The Athletics history of green and gold has been around since day one in Oakland, in 1968. They moved into the Bay Area that year which pushed a little on the Giants territory, making the region the smallest populated to have two baseball teams, but the Oakland Athletics found a good footing in their city winning three consecutive World Series titles in 1972, 1973, and 1974 which made them the only team in MLB history to achieve the status of a Dynasty other than the New York Yankees.

This Oakland Athletics cap is the current On-Field Fitted that is produced, but the coloration has been used by the team ever since the forgettable season of 1994. From the team's formation by moving to Oakland in 1968, they wore their traditional Kelly Green cap with the Gold brim both home and away, but moving towards the 1993 season the team decided to create a specific Away hat, which along with the Home version of the cap that year the darker green was introduced, but the away hat was a base forest green crown and brim with white script. A season later the team made the decision to slightly alter the away caps that they had introduced the season before, the alteration simply replaced the white script with gold which represented the team's colours much better than the previous.

This cap employs the modern Dark Green material as implored by New Era and the stitching on the front is a non-metallic gold thread. The stitching used is very clean and when raised is only done in one layer. The raised embroidery is extremely clean and doesn't have any issues that I have described previously with the Kansas City Royals, and the way the raised embroidery is done makes it especially clean. The raised embroidery uses a rounded finish which really makes it pop off of the cap rather than being relatively flat as some logos can be.

The batterman logo on the rear may have unintentionally derived a throwback to the original Athletics caps by utilising a Kelly Green thread along with the non-metallic gold, by using these two choices of thread the team inadvertently created this throwback by trying to avoid a repetition of colours that might disappear when comparing the batterman logo to the base cap material.

The Oakland Athletics road cap is always one that I have been interested in acquiring, but I do believe that the cap would be much better had it been an original wool cap rather than the modern day 100% On-Field Polyester. I can't really say why I would prefer it in wool over polyester, but there is definitely a mystique about the Wool caps sometimes that the modern day Polyester caps lack. The Old English “A” located on the front of the cap is classic and could never be replaced, but I do believe that the cap would slightly improve if the team would the lower case “s” would be switched to an Old English font rather than the unimpressive Arial font it currently uses.