The Mysterious Yankees Logo

The Mysterious Yankees Logo

By Joe Hitchcock

I went to school in the south of England in the early 2000s. It was a normal public school in the suburbs with blazers and ties, fights and mopeds, alcopops, Turkey Twizzlers, and low-level despair.

Nothing about myself or the school had any rightful connection to baseball. If you spoke about sports, you discussed Southampton FC. If you were a boy, you played rugby and soccer. If you were a girl, it was field hockey and netball. There was sometimes cricket in the summer, which at least involved a bat. 

But, for reasons unknown, there was a six-month period, I want to say it was 2002, when all the toughest kids in the grade decided to wear Yankees hats. It was mostly the navy snapback version, but really it was anything with the logo they could get their hands on. Lots of counterfeit ones, some with glitter, even the white and pink colorway. They put them on in the mornings and at lunch until spotted by teachers, and again as soon as the bell rang at the end of the day. 

It’s tradition to tweak your school uniform for the walk home. It shows your allegiance. If you were a little dangerous, you’d wear your tie super short and flip up your blazer collar. If you were an indie sort of person, you’d reverse the tie completely and wear it skinny side out. Swapping blazer for a black hoodie was emo. Shirt tucked in, even after school hours, was a firm commitment to the difficult path. As my friends and I took our skate shoes from our backpacks, the kids that you tried not to make eye contact with covered their buzzed, frosted, or gelled heads. It was an unspoken, unanimous decision. None of us knew why they wore them or what the logo meant, but we thought it looked pretty cool.

That ornate, interlocking N and Y was definitely a mysterious thing to a nine-year-old in millennium UK. Sure, baseball was connected. But how? What, or where, is a Yankee? Manchester United plays soccer in Manchester. Chelsea in Chelsea. Yankee must be a New York borough, we decided. But, a Yankee must also be more than that because Jay-Z wears the logo. So does J.Lo and a bunch of other celebrities and we know they’re not baseball players. How do the N and Y connect with all these US cultural imports we see on TV every day?

At the time, America was selling itself to the UK mostly through music. We’re talking peak 2000s persona hip hop—MTV Cribs, gold grillz, getting shot seven times, cars-and-money, rags to riches. Millions of English children consuming thug-life with their Weetos. Studying our source materials, we found the answer: what else could the Yankees logo be but some form of gang sign, co-opted from its original meaning? Bloods. Crips. Yankees. That’s why the tough kids at my school wore them.

In our white, suburban, still-forming brains, it all slotted together pretty nicely. It fed the idea of America as a mysterious melting pot of the kind still opposed by most parts of England. A place where white and Black people lived together, harmoniously or otherwise—which was alien. After Gavin, the only brown kid on our street, died of leukemia, ‘minority’ in the village meant the two Italian families. Wherever Yankees hats came from, it was a place where Black culture was as accessible as the national pastime.

I wasn’t in a gang. My friends weren’t tough. But that didn’t stop us from wanting to join in. One summer, while scouring the street market in our local town for baseball hats, I found a knock-off Yankees bandanna. Thus was the birth of the Bandanna Gang. For around a month, we roamed the housing estate in our misinformed takes on the Durag, some sporting bandit masks, others wearing napkins, and one with a tea towel fastened behind his glasses like a shepherd in a Nativity play. I was de facto leader, as the only member wearing the actual Yankees logo, though my responsibilities mainly consisted of choosing the next street corner for us to hang around. We even took the Bandana Gang on holiday to France. My cousin, brother, and I appearing at post-9/11 customs with headwraps and our arms full of PlayStation wires and power adapters. At which point, we were thoroughly searched.

The fact that the Yankees hat remains an everyday fashion item is worth noting. What other piece of team merch is worn by so many non-fans? A Brazil soccer shirt, maybe. The All-Blacks rugby jersey. Perhaps it’s only those franchises who have done enough to become synonymous with their sport.

Spike Lee contacted New Era in 1996, the year New York won their first World Series since ‘78, to request his famous custom red NY hat. Common opinion cites this as the moment the hat left the ballpark, the beginning of the separation between logo and team. Three years later, New Era became the MLB’s official hat manufacturer, and another couple of years later, the Yankees hat was being worn by school kids in England who couldn’t tell you the first thing about baseball.

Joe Hitchcock is your friendly neighborhood internet writer. He now lives next door to the Nat Bailey Stadium, home of the Vancouver Canadians, where he spent his summer evenings before COVID. Read more of his writing via @heyjoehitchcock.

Justine Backlund is an illustrator and visual art teacher living in Vancouver, Canada.