Baseball Nostalgia Is Old Hat for William Arlt

A pile of rags in St. Louis spawned a growth industry that has William Arlt tipping his cap -- or more accurately caps -- at the country’s fondness for baseball nostalgia.

Famous and long-forgotten teams of the past -- the Kansas City Monarchs, the Brooklyn Tip-Tops, the Dallas Griffins -- are represented by small pieces of colorful flannel that hang from the wall at Arlt’s Cooperstown Ball Cap Company.

“It’s pretty useless,” said Arlt of his custom-made replicas of old-style baseball caps. “People don’t need baseball caps like they need food.”

That may be true, but people certainly crave Arlt’s creations. Next to the old farmhouse he, his wife and their son inhabit is a new, two-story building Arlt constructed to accommodate what started as a fascination, progressed to a hobby and is now a flourishing enterprise.

“The question is how to expand to keep it in some relation to you,” said Arlt. “I keep expanding because I want to make the hats better. There’s a state of perfection which I still quite haven’t reached.”

The minute flaws Arlt sees in his caps haven’t detracted from their appeal to those who pay $40 for his unique hats. Arlt said he sells between 150 and 175 caps a week.

“The thing is the quality was so good in the old days,” he said. “The hat had such integrity in and of itself that that’s what I like about it, the thickness of the flannel, the leather band and so on.”

With the proliferation of polyester caps featuring adjustable headbands and reinforced front panels, it’s difficult to develop an appreciation for the low-tech caps worn by the game’s earlier players. Arlt got his when he worked as a dealer in vintage clothing 10 years ago.

On a buying trip to St. Louis, Arlt came across “these bins of caps about as big as that wall. Old, filthy caps. And one in every 1,000 of those caps was an old wool ball cap. Everybody loves old wool caps, the kind of thing you grew up with. When you were a kid, you had an old, wool ball cap.”

Arlt hadn’t thought of making caps himself until a birthday trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1982. There, he fell in love with the short-brimmed, gray and blue cap worn by Walter Johnson and the Washington Senators in 1926.

“I wanted that cap, but it wasn’t available,” he said. “I had access to caps, so I found me a gray cap and a blue cap and I cut the blue peak off the gray cap and cut it down to the right size and sewed it in there by hand.”

Intrigued, Arlt began spending time with the Hall’s cap collection. “I looked at them with a magnifying glass and turned them inside out and looked at the eyelets and the buttons.”

At first, Arlt made all his replicas by hand, each taking about eight hours. “Everyone that I would make, somebody would buy. And people were begging me to do them. I was making them for my friends and nobody flinched at spending $35-$40 for it.”

As word of Arlt and his caps began to circulate, he began getting special orders. “When I first started this, some guy wrote me: ‘Uncle Dewey played for the Abilene Blue Sox back in 1941. Can you make me a cap?’ There’s no other way to get these.”

After doing the appropriate research, Arlt made that 1941 Abilene Blue Sox cap. Research on some 1,200 teams allows him to make a 1942 New Orleans Pelicans cap. Or a 1915 Chicago Whales cap. Or an 1898 Cleveland Spiders cap.

“That’s the fun part of the business, going around digging up all this old stuff,” he said. “I’ve started going to historical societies of different states. I took a trip last year to Arizona and New Mexico and found some incredible baseball stuff.”

Arlt said he can reproduce “any hat made before 1955” but has also just signed a licensing agreement with Major League Baseball which will allow him to make modern teams’ hats the old-fashioned way.

Arlt has gotten orders from owners of fantasy leagues asking for hats to represent their teams and will supply caps for an upcoming movie on a mythical woman’s baseball league.

Most old team owners weren’t very particular about what their caps looked like, he said. “Most things end up being, you know, A-B-C-D-E-F-G,” he said, singing the alphabet song.

“But somebody must have been thinking somewhere along the lines for that (Oakland) Oaks cap,” said Arlt, pointing to a gray cap fronted with a white ‘O’ sewed onto a green oak leaf.

“There are some extraordinary hats,” he said. “When you find the Newark Eagles or the Oakland Oaks, it looks like somebody with some graphic sense had done it. When you see the (Dallas) Griffins, it obviously catches your eye. Or the three Bs (of the Birmingham Black Sox) stuck together.”

Arlt admires the work of today’s big-league cap makers, up to a point. “They look perfect, but there’s something wrong with that perfection,” he said. “It’s too stylized.”

Baseball’s hats, like its players, seem far removed from their rough-hewn predecessors, he said.

“If you look at the pictures of some of the old guys in the Gashouse Gang, some of the guys would take the holes in their hats and just rip them so you’d have big diamonds in the middle of the hats. It was like the torn sweat shirt look,” he said.

“You don’t see that stuff anymore,” Arlt said with a whimsical sigh.