As revenues started to fall in the 1930s, Harold Koch -- Ehrhardt's son -- knew he needed to find a new revenue source. He noticed how popular baseball and its caps were becoming, so he set his sights on that market.
"He developed a cap based on the Brooklyn-style cap, which he felt was probably closest to what we were doing, most popular from what he could see across the market and fit in nicely with our manufacturing process," Wannemacher said. "They were actually savvy enough back then to understand that if you want to sell a baseball cap, you should probably get it on a baseball player's head."
With Cleveland being the closest big league team to the store, Koch took a train down to Cleveland and tried to woo the team. It worked: When he left, he had sold New Era's first big league cap to the Indians, debuting a red-and-navy model in 1934.
"That's where we got our foot in the door with baseball in Cleveland," Wannemacher said. "Then subsequently, every year after that, we would pick up a team or two here and there. The story goes that once we got a team, we never lost it. A lot of it had to do with quality and being able to manufacture this stuff. They developed a system here, kind of Henry Ford-style on how to produce the hats en masse, which helped us out a lot."
Those with sharp eyes may notice something, though: This Cleveland cap looks awfully floppy and doesn't have the distinctive crown that players wear today. That's because the 59Fifty -- the cap worn by all Major League ballplayers -- was nearly 20 years away from being developed.
Koch had noticed that caps often looked flat upon a ballplayer's head, with the logo laying back and almost looking up to the sky. He wanted to combat that, so he constructed a crown to maintain the shape of the cap and give team logos a perfect, forehead-sized billboard to be displayed from.
"Harold didn't design this to be an iconic product. He designed it through practicality and a love of design," Maidment said. "Let's design something beautiful, and it becomes iconic. This was all about how the logos have got to be upright, we've got to be able to see them."
Thinking of a player's forehead as the advertising space for the logo inspired Koch to build the cap with buckram in the front, so that it would remain structured no matter whose head it was on.