
Good morning Uni Watchers, it’s Friday — we made it!
Mere days after MLB released the 2025 Batting Practice cap collection, which is running back the 2024 BP caps, MLB has now unveiled new gray BP caps for every team. As you’ll soon see, the new gray caps are basically just color swaps for the BP caps originally introduced in 2024, although there are a couple of exceptions.
Most folks agree that last year’s crop of BP caps were excellent, so it makes sense for MLB to hold them over this season. Of course, without any “new” BP caps, clearly they’d be missing out on a merch opportunity to provide new-for-2025 caps, as there are many out there who will basically purchase any new caps for “their” team (or just as fashion statements), but the gray caps also now provide the opportunity for a “home” and “away” BP cap for each team.
As I have probably mentioned before, I’m not a cap collector in the traditional sense (even though I have well over 200 baseball caps, almost none of those are for any specific team, and I honestly don’t like the look of the 5950 style, plus I wear every cap I own, frequently getting them dirty and sweaty), so I often get confused over whether a cap is for BP, Spring Training (yes, they have the ST identifier on the side) and then there are also “Clubhouse Caps,” which I believe are designed to be worn for post game interviews and the like. If I were to buy a team cap, it would be in the 3930 style with the lower crown.
Be that as it may, here are your 2025 gray BP caps, arranged by league and division.
American League East
BALTIMORE ORIOLES
BOSTON RED SOX
NEW YORK YANKEES
TAMPA BAY RAYS
TORONTO BLUE JAYS
American League Central
CHICAGO WHITE SOX
CLEVELAND GUARDIANS
DETROIT TIGERS
KANSAS CITY ROYALS
MINNESOTA TWINS
American League West
HOUSTON ASTROS
LOS ANGELES ANGELS
ATHLETICS
SEATTLE MARINERS
TEXAS RANGERS
National League East
ATLANTA BRAVES
MIAMI MARLINS
NEW YORK METS
PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES
WASHINGTON NATIONALS
National League Central
CHICAGO CUBS
CINCINNATI REDS
MILWAUKEE BREWERS
PITTSBURGH PIRATES
(The Pirates 5950 did not appear on the Fanatics site, but there will definitely be a 5950 version.)
ST. LOUIS CARDINALS
National League West
ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS
COLORADO ROCKIES
LOS ANGELES DODGERS
SAN DIEGO PADRES
SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS
• The Mets, Braves, Yankees and White Sox each got two gray BP caps.
• The Braves and Dodgers both have a much darker gray base for their BP cap. The Braves also have the lighter gray, while the Dodgers also have a lighter gray cap, but that was a part of the 2024 BP cap release.
• Some of the colors on the new BP caps are odd: For example, the Astros 2024/25 “home” BP cap features their gold/orange/red tequila sunrise colors, but the “road” BP cap features shades of blue, which doesn’t really work with their tequila sunrise color scheme.
• Some teams, like Boston and Washington, feature a bright red crown, which are easily identifiable team colors, but their corresponding gray compatriots look a bit odd when the identifying color is removed.
• I suspect the gray Marlins cap will struggle with visibility issues at any distance.
• The Yankees have two distinct gray BP caps (one has a gray brim, the other midnight blue). Their “home” BP caps both had midnight blue crowns.
There are probably a few things I’m missing, but those are what stood out to me.
Since I consider these to primarily be a merch dump, and they’re not worn during actual game play, I’m fine with the designs, and I know there are many who like them.
Still no news on Spring Training caps, but this Royals Cap (shown in Wednesday’s article) no longer appears on the Fanatics website. I have no idea if that means anything, but I’m keeping an eye on it.
Are you a fan of the new gray BP releases? If you’re a cap collector, will you buy one? Are there any that stand out to you as particularly good (or particularly bad)?
Am I missing anything?
Feel free to express your thoughts down in the comments below!
Literally not a single one of the grey BP caps looks equal to or better than the standard ones from last year. I don’t know who would want to get one of these!
When you say that the BP design was “held over,” I’m pretty sure MLB’s pattern for a few years now has been to use BP designs in two-year cycles. These replaced the trucker caps, which were around for two years, and those replaced the design-within-the-design caps, which were around for two years, the version before that was when they starting doing retro and different types of logos — just the sun ray for the Rays, were around for two years.
I think some of these — the regular versions, not these gray ones — are really good! I’m bummed because the Mets home cap is awful! I know they are paying homage to the 1986-ear racing stripe jerseys, but I just don’t like ’em!
“What if we made it boring?”
-marketing (probably)
These are most likely just fashion-variants that will never see any BP time — home or road. Like you said — just a merch dump.
Braves look monochromatic……why drain color from “a” logo? Houston looks like a guy that likes a tequila sunrise but can’t commit to the orange/red combo..so make my rainbow guts blue, please! The proliferation of daily wear caps Batting practice, clubhouse, and SpringT has diluted the idea drawers. If we get a repeat of ’24 with trucker mesh backs….grrrrrrrrrr.
Yeah, the Astros went from Tequila Sunrise to Blue Curacao.
Given the wildly popular rainbow variants that have been worn by the team’s farm teams in Sugar Land and Corpus Christi, you wonder what the parent club is planning — it is, after all, the 50th anniversary of the Tequila Sunrise uniform this coming season.
Without trying to say which of these gray caps are better than the “more colorful” counterparts, and quite frankly without caring about legibility on a field (for me, only the regular season and postseason game caps really “matter,” so these caps are 99% merchandise noise, with 1% in case a Getty photographer gets a nice photo up close), in no particular order, my favorite gray caps *as fashion* here are the Blue Jays, Athletics, Marlins, Cardinals, and Brewers.
Now for the answer to a different question: which of these caps would I actually like to see in a regular season game? My strongest opinion is the black-trimmed White Sox. That could look great as a road alt, on top of the black jerseys and the gray pants.
Since this is a new Athletics hat with an elephant logo, I think its safe to say that the fears of the team not using the elephant in Sacramento were unfounded (and honestly never made much sense in the first place)
I was having the same thought. But alternatively they could have made the decision after the production cycle so too late to change?
Honestly, the whole thing felt like a rumor circulated mostly by east bay fans that think various aspect of the team ‘belong’ to them even if they predate the team’s time in California (such as the elephant or the colors or even the name lol).
Like Stomper was making appearances around Sacramento while these rumors were circulating, it was very strange really.
Haven’t some teams worn BP caps in game play? i seem to recall the Twins doing so years ago, and was the Yankees gray-billed cap designed as BP only, but ARod wanted it in championship season games?
I think the Pirates wore their caps with the Stargell Stars in games a few times.
Phillies had their cream alts on at home on Phanatic Birthday promotion and swapped out their blue hat with red P with the BP blue cap with a Phanatic head.
Not sure the gray version with petrified Phanatic was a good variation.
The grey caps would look so much better if MLB would have kept team colors on the logos.
Some of them do look good, I don’t hate that Giants cap, but most of them are just bland.
Yeah, for the Giants specifically, if they had kept the baseball white this would be a good hat. Instead I’m 50/50 on whether or not I would wear it.
I guess they’re not bad. But they’re not good either.
They have no reason to exist.
These caps are all very meh.
GTGFTS: 2006, Week 15, December 17th. The score shown – NE 40, Houston 7, is the final. Notably, the Patriots wore their (ill-advised) silver jerseys at home. The silver shirts would get one more appearance in 2007 (Week 3 vs. Buffalo) before being retired.
These might be the worst caps MLB has ever associated with all 30 teams. The Reds cap makes no sense at all.
What a waste of time, effort, and material.
Some of these are good, most are boring. If the Red Sox cap had even a splash of red on it I’d be into it, I think.
@Phil I hate the high crown too, that’s when I found out about the low profile 59/50. I love them (not everyone does) but it to me feels like when finally I got the crown to collapse from sweat or wear on the typical 59/50 except from day one and it’s clean. They’re hard to find in my experience – team shops almost never have them – and they’re really marked discretely so it’s hard to even know if you have one but it made the diff for me!
The low profile 59FIFTY is a godsend. Not all releases have them, but usually all of the on-field models do.
This is very good to know. I don’t buy team caps, but I do have a very old Mets 5950 (I think it’s wool and has a green underbrim), which I haven’t worn in years because it’s high profile. I probably won’t buy a new Mets cap for the foreseeable future, but knowing they make them fitted in low profile is actually very appealing.
GTGFTU:
September 19, 2010
Indianapolis Colts vs NY Giants 38 – 14 in Peyton’s last season with Colts.
Never knew Colts ever wore red jerseys.
*GTGFTU:
Wait I’m pretty sure this is the 2010 Pro Bowl
GTGFTU
Peyton manning’s last Pro Bowl as a Colt.
30 Jan 2011
NFC wins 55-41
One of my Top Five unis for the Pro Bowl.
I’ve never understood why the newest Ticker is put under Recent Posts and not chronologically with the other posts. The Tickers eventually fall in line chronologically with the other posts, but why make readers scroll past old posts to get to the newest Ticker? When I get to the website, there are two posts with today’s date, two posts with yesterday’s date, and then a Ticker with today’s date under Recent Posts. Wouldn’t it be easier (and less confusing) to just get rid of the Recent Posts header and just list everything chronologically? Especially if the Tickers are going back to five days/week.
Good question and point. I don’t handle the technical aspects of how that works. But I asked our webmaster to make the Ticker more “visible” on the front page, which is why (if you scrolled down to the “and finally…” part of the early post, I showed you how you can find all the Tickers. But as far as *why* they stack up like that? I don’t know. I’ll ask the webmaster if this can be fixed so the Ticker is listed chronologically with all the other articles.
I really like the aqua of the Diamondbacks. I’d be good if they got rid of the “Sedona Red” and just went with this with black. When they abandoned their World Series winning colors of purple, teal, and black, their lame excuse was that there was another team in their division with purple, the Rockies. And they said Red wasn’t a common color in the NL. I thought st the time a good compromise would be to just drop the purple and use teal as the primary color. They keep calling this color of aqua teal, and I actually like this aqua better, and maybe call it turquoise since that has a rich history in Arizona.
Boy, the Phanatic got old over the offseason.
That makes two of us; once you go gray, you stay gray. :(
Any official word, Phil, from MLB or any other source as to whether or not these are actually on-field road BP caps or just fashion?
I’m not quite sure what you mean — they are listed on the Fanatics website (and I’m sure other retailers as well) as “New Era 2025 Batting Practice 59FIFTY Fitted Hat”
Here’s an example for the Phillies: link
With a $45 price tag, I believe that means they’ll be worn for actual on-field batting practice. (And I believe in the past, some teams have actually worn their BP caps in games).
But I am not, unfortunately, all that familiar with all the caps and merch produced (it’s all basically designed to part foolks with their money).
Perhaps someone who is more familiar with all the cap machinations can answer this better than I can.
These are all pretty universally worse than their full-color counterparts. Most aren’t even offensively bad, just boring. That said, I actually would dig the Angels one as a cap worn on the road with their red jerseys. going mono-gray would be a bit much, but a gray-red-gray look would be fairly solid to be honest.
Thanks, Phil. I know it’s crazy to keep track of what’s actually worn on field and what is not. The clubhouse collection that was released today has four different Red Sox caps as part of it. Perhaps no rhyme no reason to why any of them would be worn, especially for the clubhouse collection.
Yeah, I got an email from the Mets today plugging their clubhouse collection. And I saw multiple caps for that.
I’m not especially concerned with those, as they won’t be worn on field. BP caps and ST caps are another matter, as while neither may be worn during the regular season, they’ll both be worn on-field (either in Spring Training or during batting practice).
Brutal, especially the San Francisco logo with its multiple black outlines.
Why does the Cub look like Kung Fu Panda?
Coming soon:
First Inning Caps, Second Inning Caps, Third Inning Caps, etc.
National Anthem Caps, Take Me Out to the Ballgame Caps, Rain Delay Caps, Extra Innings Caps.
Make-up game game caps
Well that’s a merch dump. Though the Phils’ BP cap continues to be fun, and the “out of CMY toner” grayscale tequila sunrise for Houston is hilarious to me.
Rangers and Phillies looking like a red team this year.
Did I go color blind? Is my printer low on toner? If you’ve ever wanted to make everyone you encounter ask these questions, these are the caps for you.
Here for the complaints.
Yankees and Dodgers caps aren’t following the gray theme; Atlanta didn’t, either, but at least they had one cap of each.
Honestly the only one that I like is the White Sox “black” cap. Most of the other ones look like I’m watching a TV show from 1955.
So the A’s elephant gets to stay green, but the Phanatic looks like he needs to be rushed to the ICU?
So the Mets have 5 batting practice hats now if I’m not mistaken? They already had a grey road one. Weird.
Making the BP caps gray is one thing. But they drained almost all the color out of them. And what color was kept seems arbitrary from one team to the next. The Phillies’ gray cap would be reasonable with a green Phanatic. Most of the logo elements don’t stand out on these at all. And at $42 a pop, I don’t need a bland version of a hat I would have bought already.
So the Tigers have two gray caps then?
It is interesting to see the elephant stay on the Athletics cap – they seem to have dumped the sleeve patch for the uniforms as they migrate to Sacramento, so seeing this is interesting.