2016-02-28 – I own a lot of baseball caps. I have college caps and political caps and travel caps. I don’t really like to wear hats, but they are often better than the alternative.

In the winter, I wear one under my parka hood. The bill keeps the faux fur from the hood out of my eyes. If it is snowing, it offers a bit of protection for my glasses. And the hat keeps a layer of warm air close to my scalp. When I first started wearing a baseball cap in winter, the conventional wisdom was that, if you kept your head warm, your whole body will feel warm. The current conventional wisdom is that the old warm-head advice is wrong. These days it’s better to be a hot head.

In the summer, I sometimes wear one (though I try to avoid it). I’ll wear one if I plan to be outside on a sunny day. My hair is no longer thick enough to protect me from sunburn and I am not going to try to use sun screen up there. The bill also provides some protection against glare—almost as good as sunglasses.

With my thin hair, you might think I am motivated like Donald Trump to hide the “shame.” Unlike the Donald, I learned long ago that comb overs are a bad idea. Thirty years ago, I discovered that you can meticulously groom your hair and then walk out into the wind and the wind will give you a comb over, in spite of your best effort to prevent that look. So I’ve always kept mine pretty short so that doesn’t happen. The cap doesn’t help my hair. So I’ll avoid it if I can. It’s never very comfy anyway.