Capshot: Jacksonville Expos 59Fifty

One of the scorching hot releases from Hat Club is this remake on a cult classic in the hat collecting world.

The Jacksonville Expos took the name of its parent team (the Montreal Expos) in 1985 after playing as the Jacksonville Suns in various leagues since 1962. The Expos played in Wolfson Park, formerly known as Jacksonville Baseball Park. The park was built in 1954 and hosted baseball games until 2002 where the park was demolished and a newer facility was built two blocks away. The Expos would exist until the end of the 1990 season. Among the most notable players to don a Jacksonville Expos uniform are Hall of Fame pitcher Randy Johnson, 1997 National League MVP Larry Walker, Marquis Grissom, “Big Cat” Andres Galarraga, and Padres favorite Archie Cianfrocco.

“Pinwheel” white/red/blue crown
Blue brim and squatcho
Red New Era logo
Red, white and blue Jacksonville Expos logo

The Jacksonville Expos cap is merely a copy of their parent team’s famous “pinwheel” style cap. The unique white, red, and blue motif would be a mainstay for the entirety of the Jacksonville Expos’ existence and for Montreal until the Montreal team switched to an all-blue cap after the 1991 season. An interesting detail is that the Jacksonville uniform retained the Montreal “M” logo; this was thanks to frugality in the earlier days of Minor League baseball. Parent teams regularly handed down their prior year’s uniforms to their minor league counterparts. This is also why a lot of earlier minor league teams retained the names of their parent teams.

One of the coolest aspects of the Jacksonville Expos logo is that it’s merely half of the Montreal Expos logo and still retains the charm of the embedded details: the red “swirl” is an E, and the entirety of the logo is a J.

The rear of the cap features the MiLB logo. Technically this is an anachronism: this version of the MiLB logo didn’t exist until 2008. I imagine this ultimately has to do with licensing. If you want to recreate a cap from MiLB history, you need a MiLB logo on the cap. A minor nitpick overall.

The underbrim is retro green and the sweatband is thankfully black. While sweatbands of the era were either leather or white, I don’t mind a modern modification. Black sweatbands are infinitely more wearable than white sweatbands which in my climate are reserved only for winter wear.

Cap Availability Status: Rare

Good luck finding this particular iteration of the cap. As part of Hat Club’s massive slate of new releases, this cap was considered one of the hottest drops thanks to its cache as an Expos cap and its relative rarity in the cap collecting world. Hat Club has mentioned a possible second round of these caps, so you may be in luck down the line.