Two things worth a hat happened this weekend, four hundred miles and one desert apart.
Cleveland, September 5: two swings, two sides of the plate
A Cleveland shortstop hit a grand slam batting left-handed in the fourth inning. Then he led off the ninth batting right-handed and ended the game with a home run. Five players in the history of the game had done both in a single game before him. The last of them did it in 1991. Three of the five are in the Hall of Fame.
Cleveland scored the final six runs to win 7–6, then walked off the second game of the doubleheader too. It was the kind of afternoon that sounds made up when you describe it later.
The patch is the bat and nothing else — contour-cut from dark walnut, no border, no lettering, die-cut to the barrel, handle and knob. It became the Wood Baseball Bat Trucker Hat.
Shop the Wood Baseball Bat Trucker Hat →
Goldstone, California: a new ear on the Mojave
Out in the Mojave Desert, at the Goldstone complex, a 34-metre dish came on the air after thirteen years in the building. It is the fifth antenna added under the deep-space network's expansion, and it exists because the traffic coming back from spacecraft has outgrown what the older dishes can carry.
It is a strange kind of infrastructure to love, but people do: an enormous, precise, slow-turning ear pointed at nothing you can see, parked in the emptiest place in California so that nothing on Earth talks over the signal.
The patch is the dish alone, die-cut to its own silhouette in gold with a satin black edge. It became the Gold Dish Antenna Trucker Hat.
Shop the Gold Dish Antenna Trucker Hat →
Before the week swallows them
A switch-hit walk-off and a dish thirteen years in the making are both the sort of thing that is enormous for about a day. Put one on: the Wood Baseball Bat Trucker Hat or the Gold Dish Antenna Trucker Hat.
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Cleveland's 11,000-Square-Foot Rock Mural and New York Harbor's Oyster Comeback
Cleveland's 11,000-Square-Foot Rock Mural and New York Harbor's Oyster Comeback