In the first installment of these cap chronicles, I figured I’d start with the team that launched me into a life of baseball. The Denver Zephyrs were the final Minor League Baseball team in my hometown and the first professional team I ever saw in person. The city of Denver has been home to pro ball as far back as the mid-1880s, but the region’s baseball history was largely authored by a franchise called the Denver Bears (more on them in a later post) who existed in various incarnations and at various levels for over 60 years from 1900-1984. In the mid-1980s, a group of investors hoping to lure Major League Baseball to the city founded an organization called the Denver Zephyrs Baseball Club. The club wasn’t actually a baseball club. It was a phantom outfit designed to showcase Denver’s interest in and ability to be home to an MLB franchise, an effort that would pay off in the early ’90s.
Following the 1984 season, Denver Bears owner Gerald H. Phipps, a former owner of the Denver Broncos, sold the Bears to that group of investors, led by Denver real estate magnate John Dikeou and his brothers. By 1985, the Mile High City’s team in the American Association was rebranded as the Zephyrs in honor of the iconic passenger train that once ran between Chicago and Denver.
Like the Z’s, I was also born in ’85, and my earliest baseball memories are Zephyrs games. Like their forerunners, the Z’s played at Mile High Stadium which was originally opened to host baseball as Bears Stadium in 1948. By the mid-’80s, the facility had grown to over 75,000 capacity which made for strange environs hosting a Triple-A team that generally didn’t draw more than a few thousand fans to its games.
The exception to that was always Fourth of July games when 50,000-plus fans would pack Mile High for the Bears’ and Zephyrs’ legendary fireworks shows. I still have a vivid memory of a childhood friend and I plugging our ears and watching the fireworks with wide-eyed wonderment while looking at each other every once in a while to say, “the GRAAAAAND FINAAAAALEEEE” when the show would pick up in intensity. The Z’s hosted players like Gary Sheffield and moments like Joey Meyer’s estimated 582-foot home run.
In 1991, the Zephyrs — then a Brewers affiliate — won the American Association title. The next day, in first grade, I contributed to our classroom’s daily “Morning Headlines” project (a giant pad on which our teacher wrote things we learned about in the news) with “THE ZEPHYRS WON THE CHAMPIONSHIP!” Triple-A titles are big deals to six-year-olds.
This hat, while a Zephs original, wasn’t mine until long after their departure. The Z’s played their last season in Denver in 1992 with the Rockies arriving the following year. In the mid-2010s, while browsing the Mecca that is Bill’s Sports Collectibles, I spotted a handful of Zephyrs hats on the bottom shelf of their hat rack. It’s a size 7 1/2 but fits perfectly despite me normally being a 7 3/8. It’s got New Era’s cool old school pre-flag logo, and it’s also from the era before the MLB and MiLB logos were on the backs of team caps.
There you have it! Hat installment No. 1.
Also, the Zephyrs’ team slogan was “Just for ‘Z’ fun of it” which is so charmingly cheesy, I had to figure out a way to work it in here.