D-Town headwear dilemma

Although the Tigers are now in the World Series, back in 2004 my girlfriend and I attended a game a Comerica Park where the then-dismal Tigers lost to the Chicago White Sox.

(It would be easy to disparage a team for using "x" to replace "cks" but it was good enough for Boston, so it was not without precedent; the sports public has accepted this early version of text-message diction long before there were devices to allow text messaging. The seeds are sown early in some cases.)

Anyway, after the game we walked around the stadium—the whole thing—in search of a Tigers cap for me. I didn't want a standard fitted wool cap like the players wear, however. In my younger, more-serious days of following baseball, only a fitted cap would do, but now well into my apathetic semi-middle years, I have learned such hats are rather warm in the summer. The local friend who attended the game with us wore a Detroit warm-up cap, which had this mesh pattern of tiny holes in it to allow airflow, and didn't seem like a bad-looking cap, so we went in search of one of those in my size. Seemed a simple enough mission.



The circumference of my head has always been a bit small, relative to my height. I'm not sure why I feel reluctant to admit that; it's not like my head is freakishly small or anything, nor is there any supposedly correlation between one body part and another regarding the head. I consider my head to be perfectly normal, but it's the only one I've ever had, so I'm rather prejudiced in this area; why many others have larger heads I don't know, but I'd argue it's just as viable to state they are the unusual ones (despite their apparent majority).

The caps we sought were not adjustable, but semi-fitted with elastic or something. They weren't as narrowly sized as the wool ones; they came in S-M, M-L, L-XL (so it was a matter of determining in which range one's head fell). There were lots of the L-XL available, but that was too big for my head; we couldn't find any M-L, which we presumed would fit me. We came across a couple S-M ones, but those were, somewhat satisfyingly, too small. We went to every open merchandise store in the stadium (although there really weren't that many) and found no caps in the right size. Eventually we abandoned the search and I purchased a grey t-shirt with the old-type athletic department writing ("property of Detroit Tigers baseball club") on it.

This wouldn't happen at Dodger Stadium or Anaheim Stadium, I know that. Southern Californians may not stick around for the end of baseball games, but our stadiums know how to adequately stock merchandise.


I take the fact that we couldn't find any caps in the right size as proof that my size head is the common one, not the larger ones.

We did eventually find a Tigers hat for me--a cotton, adjustable one--in (of all places) Target. In L.A.

Of course.