For their first dozen seasons, the Toronto Blue Jays wore one cap and one cap only, a royal blue crown with a matching visor, and on the front, a stylized double-blue bird head on a red baseball and maple leaf, set on a fairly random field of white.
The coloured front panel was a style of the time. During the Blue Jays’ expansion season in 1977, a quarter of all Major League teams used some variation of this on their lids, but as the years rolled on, tastes in baseball fashion changed. In 1989, the Blue Jays introduced an all-blue cap to be worn exclusively on the road, halving how often the team would wear the white-panelled cap. When the team won their first World Series three years later, it was on the road while wearing the all-blue cap.
With the Blue Jays ranked 27th of 28 teams in U.S. merchandise sales, despite a series of winning seasons and numerous All-Stars on the roster, the club knew it had to try something. On June 30, 1993, team president Paul Beeston announced that the white-paneled home cap would be eliminated for 1994 and the club would add a blue jersey as an alternate top. There were no plans to change the logo or uniform.
Globe and Mail columnist Neil A. Campbell pulled few punches that morning, “Let’s face it: the Blue Jay look is boring. That little blue bird with the beak sticking out, the open lettering circling his head and the red maple leaf in the corner, that look is for the birds … The home cap, specifically, is outdated. That white panel on the front is a baseball look that went out of style years ago.”
What followed next sped up the timetable significantly.
On the morning of Beeston’s announcement, Toronto was in the midst of a four-game winning streak and led the Yankees by three games in the American League East. That night, they lost. The next day, another loss. And another, and another, and another, by July 5, after five straight losses, the lead was down to one. A change was needed, any change at all, to try to end this funk.
For their game against the AL West-leading Chicago White Sox on July 6, Blue Jays’ equipment manager Jeff Ross had an idea. “We wanted to see how the blue hats looked with the white uniforms,” Ross told the Toronto Star at the time. “It wasn’t really a superstitious thing, but when you’ve lost five in a row, it’s a good time to try something like that.”
It was the first time the Blue Jays would wear anything other than their white-panelled caps at home, and Ross apparently made that switch without telling the players.
“When we went out for stretching, we were all wearing the regular blue and white cap, except for [outfielder Devon White],” Blue Jays DH Paul Molitor recalled. “We were all giving it to him. Turns out Devo’s now going to fine all the rest of us.” Devo added that “they thought I was messing around.”
Well, the cap apparently worked. The Blue Jays ended the slump with a 5-1 win over the White Sox. Newspaper columnists made sarcastic comments relating to the supposed power of the new caps.
For reasons that aren’t immediately clear, despite the win, the Jays went right back to the white panel cap the next night. They lost. They wore white again the next night, and they lost. And then one last time, on July 9, 1993, resulting in yet another loss.
The unlucky stink of the white caps latched onto the blue caps as they brought them back once again on July 10. The Jays lost again. Now with a wandering eye on what piece of the uniform to blame next, the club considered dropping their white jerseys in favour of their mesh, pullover blue batting practice tops, but starting pitcher Dave Stewart (thankfully) found them too uncomfortable. Wearing their usual white uniform tops paired with the all-blue caps, the club went on to lose their 5th straight game as they headed into the All-Star Break.
The white caps made one final cameo during the 1993 All-Star Game in Baltimore, with Toronto’s large number of player, coach, and manager representatives all wearing the familiar white front panel. Toronto closer Duane Ward finished off the American League’s win as Orioles fans booed Blue Jays and American League manager Cito Gaston for not summoning local favourite Mike Mussina from the bullpen. Not the grandest way for the cap to say “farewell.”
When the second half started on July 15, the white panel was done for good. Toronto went all-in on blue at home and wore it the rest of the season, right through to their second straight World Series title.
That was effectively the end of the white front panel cap as an on-field staple in Toronto. Over the next twenty-three years, it came back only a handful of times. A pair of Turn Back the Clock nights in 2000 and 2001, then as part of the club’s “Flashback Friday” series of games from 2008 to 2010.
A modernized take on the white-panelled cap was introduced on August 16, 2015, for the 30th anniversary of the 1985 AL East title, this time with the club’s updated 2012 logo. Fittingly, the Blue Jays made the playoffs that fall for the first time since dropping the cap. The cap popped up once in 2016, fourteen times in 2017, twenty-eight times in 2018, twenty-seven times in 2019, and five times in the shortened 2020 season. After a single appearance in 2021 and three more in 2022, including August 27 for the 30th anniversary of the 1992 champions, it vanished, never to be seen again, that was, until 2025.
Let me know if the following feels familiar…
As the 2025 season was winding down, Toronto was in first place, with the Yankees following closely behind. A six-game win streak built the lead to five before an awful stretch of six losses in seven games wiped it out. On September 25, with the two clubs now tied for first, Blue Jays closer Jeff Hoffman knew the team needed a change.
Recalling a league-wide throwback cap promotion earlier in the season, during which the Jays wore their original white-panel 1977 caps for three in Detroit, Hoffman asked if the club could bring those caps back. Well, they couldn’t, but what they could wear was that modern white-panel cap they wore eighty times over eight seasons from 2015 to 2022.
After their equipment manager did some digging through some old boxes, the white panels were back in the lockers.
“I thought someone was playing a joke on me with the hats,” manager John Schneider told MLB.com after they reappeared. “You just put on what’s in your locker. And I said, ‘What are we doing?’ Hoff wanted to just have a different feel of what we were wearing and what we were doing. And here we are.”
The tide changed immediately.
Toronto swept the final four games to clinch the AL East, wearing white panels in every game from September 25 onward, except for a pre-scheduled City Connect game on September 26. During the celebration, Hoffman downplayed any magic. “I don’t think it’s anything to do with the hats; it’s the talent and the character of the guys in here,” he told Sportsnet’s Hazel Mae.
“We just needed to change things up, and when we did, we won four in a row,” pitcher Kevin Gausman recalled to MLB.com. “A lot of these guys think these [caps] look really good. I’m a big fan of pinwheel hats. I think they’re as baseball as it gets. So I’m all for it.”
The caps stayed on for October. The Blue Jays met and eliminated the Yankees in the ALDS, all while wearing the white caps. In the ALCS against Seattle, the luck seemed to run out, as the Jays lost Games 1 and 2 at home. They left the caps at home for the trip out west, opting for their dark navy cap with powder blue uniforms, before putting the white ones back on when the series returned to the Dome as they won two to clinch the AL pennant. In the World Series against the Dodgers, Toronto wore white panels for a big win in the opener before dropping the next two. They again switched to navy for a Game 4 win at Dodger Stadium. It was the first time a white-panel cap was worn by anyone in the World Series since the Jays did it in 1992.
After the white-panel Blue Jays caps were scrapped in a less-than-respectful way in 1993, blamed for a losing streak, and effectively banished for two decades, here they are, in 2025, restoring their reputation one win at a time, getting credit for a month-long string of winning baseball, as the Jays are now just two wins away from their first World Series Championship since… oh would you look at that, 1993.
