If you look at 2014 and 2016, those are the five uniform combinations the team currently wears. The hats, jerseys and pants are the same in both years, as well as 2017 and 2018. The hats have remained constant in this arrangement since 2013.
And the Cardinals themselves explain WHEN each hat is worn. Really can't make it much simpler than that. Why can’t we have nice things? Just make the hats an entity unto themselves, like the 4th of July hats.
If you're a Cardinal fan, the book is worth the $30 cost. Every year of their history is shown the same way as the picture I posted. It's amazing. I thought I knew most of their postwar uniform history but I had no idea that from 1956-58 they wore navy blue socks on the road (still with stripes, but colors inverted from home red striped socks). Or that in 1964, the red hat was introduced primarily because Stan Musial retired at the end of the 1963 season. Ownership said they would've never changed the hat from blue while Musial was playing. Even then, the blue hat with the red STL (identical to the road alt today) continued to be worn on the road in 1964. The kicker for me was that the red hat introduced and worn at home in the 1964 regular season had a NAVY BLUE STL. I've never seen a replica of that hat anywhere, until the spring training hat this year. But the 1964 hat had a red bill vs. a blue bill.
The traditional red hat with a WHITE STL was not introduced until the home games of the 1964 World Series (the book makes clear that introducing new uniform elements for World Series games was a relatively common practice, at least through 1964). This hat became the only hat worn from 1965-1991, until the Cards brought back the navy blue hat for road games to celebrate their 100th anniversary in 1992.
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