My cap obsession leaves me looking for the A's

When does a quest become an obsession? I suppose anyone who knows me is aware I have this penchant for baseball caps. After all, a lot of people wear baseball caps.

My dad had quite a collection of caps, but none of them represented a baseball team. When he died nearly four years ago, I gathered up his collection of about 200 and gave them to Corey, his oldest grandson, who now has them on display in his Independence home.

While I have a few Nevada Tiger caps for various sports, most of my caps are various team hats for baseball.

Let's go back to the beginning. My first cap was a Boston Red Sox type my mom purchased at J.C. Penney on the east side of the Square in 1955. She didn't know who the Red Sox were but figured my initial was B. In 1956, I have two photos of me wearing caps. I had the 1956 Kansas City A's cap and for some odd reason, a New York Yankee cap.

I didn't wear a cap for a long time, but some time in the mid 1970s, members of the Kansas City Royals started giving me caps because I always wore a Nevada hat. I got Royals caps from Marty Pattin, Paul Splittorff and Darrell Porter. Porter gave me a Cardinal cap after he left Kansas City, but alas, it has a moth hole. I also got a Detroit road cap from Glen Abbott. My first minor league cap was Dan Quisenberry's from Omaha. Most, I still have.

There's nothing wrong with minor league caps. In addition to the Omaha job, there is one from the Springfield Cardinals and another from the Charleston River Dogs I picked up at their games. Joe Warren got me one from the Albuquerque Isotopes that saddens me because they are now the Isotopes and are no longer the Dukes. I guess that's kind of like the River Dogs who used to be the Rebels. Dang it, I wish Memphis still had the Chicks. There are Cardinals everywhere.

I have three models of St. Louis Browns caps and a Brooklyn Dodger hat I picked up across the street from Fenway Park back in 1980 and Dennis Leonard tried to steal it from me because he was born in Brooklyn.

Early last summer I was sitting on a park bench with Clint Kraft and John Cater eating an ice cream cone at the Lenexa Barbecue when I spotted a high school-aged kid wearing a Boston Braves cap. I pointed it out to Kraft and he said of the kid, "He doesn't know what kind of hat it is. He probably just liked it."

The only thing is, I had to have one and after a four month search, voila. That's the one I'm wearing in this column header photo that Ralph Pokorny took in Neosho one gloomy Friday night.

And now the real search is on. Both Jim Novak and I have been hunting for a likeness of the cap worn by the A's from 1956 to 1961, the blue cap with the red A outlined in white just like the one I was wearing in my first team photo back in 1956.

Know what? You can't get them easily, that's for certain.

Chris Cluck and I have checked out just about every company's Web site. In fact, I am of the opinion that MLB denies there ever was a team known as the Kansas City Athletics.

Oh, how wrong they are. I still have probably 20 ticket stubs dating back to 1958 through 1967 to prove it. Sure, I know the KC A's were awful, but they won 829 games even if it did take them 13 years to do so.

Now, I'm not going to give up until I get that hat, which might be just as likely a find as the grail Sir Galahad and the boys sought for so long. So you tell me the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this column. Quest or obsession?