This weekend is Hall of Fame Weekend around Major League Baseball, and the Cardinals are wearing caps with a fake bird on it. What do we mean by fake? The contrivance bird seen worn on the cap was never worn by the Cardinals before this promotion. It is likely based on an actual bird the Cardinals wore in 1941, but what you see is drawn incorrectly and is far from authentic. Take a look at the flawed retail product below.
Again, our best guess is that the cap you see above is based on the Cardinals’ 1941 cap that featured a single bird, chain-stitched onto red felt. Take a look below to see the authentic 1941 cap.
And now for some side-by-side comparisons.
Looking at the photos above you can clearly see that MLB and NewEra’s contrivance bird barely resembles the actual historical 1941 cap. The birds are both in a similar pose, and that’s about it. Everything else about the two logos are different. The eye, the face mask, the beak, the wing pattern, the tail feather pattern, the feet, the method in which it is embroidered, all different from each other.
So why does this fake bird exist? We assume that MLB and NewEra’s contrivance bird was created in the 1990s, around the same time the Cooperstown Collection project was launched, to sell more merchandise. This was long before anyone was looking at detailed historical photographs of the true 1941 bird. And then 30 years went by and they lazily never fixed it, which I find is a serious issue. Here’s why…
First let’s go back in time, sometime between the late 90s and the early 00s. As a child growing up in St. Louis, I was doing some sort of book report and real life reenactment project for an elementary school project. For that project I dressed up as Stan Musial and gave a presentation about his life. Part of my outfit, in an effort to wear something that Stan Musial actually wore in the 1940s, was a cap we bought from the MLB Cooperstown Collection. And in fact, I still own the cap, take a look below.
We thought, wow cool, look at this bird on the cap that Stan Musial and the 1940s Cardinals wore! Amazing stuff, right? Well… I was in elementary school, I didn’t bother to cite sources or fact check every detail of my project. And as it turns out, we were deceived. We didn’t know any better. We had never seen any historical photos of this cap. We had never read any historical newspaper accounts of this cap. We blindly trusted Major League Baseball, the Cooperstown Collection, and NewEra. Need I say more? Shouldn’t MLB, and NewEra, and anything that has the word Cooperstown be trustworthy enough to accurately recreate a historical logo… be trustworthy enough to sell authentic merchandise… be trustworthy enough to not deceive people?
Let’s fast forward in time to 2012, which is when we started this uniforms and logos project. Since 2012, we have achieved two pretty big accomplishments. One, we published an award winning book in 2016, and two, also created the website you see before you in 2023. And if you’ve read our book and perused this website, you know how many logos we have compiled, and that we also provide photographic proofs (or newspaper accounts when photos don’t exist) of where our drawings come from. As of 2025 we have been working on this project for 13 years. We didn’t just fall ass backwards into this, we’ve been meticulously researching this subject for over a decade. This is the best place to find authentic Cardinals logos, and it’s pretty easy to find the authentic 1941 Bird on our website. And even if they hadn’t used that bird, there are plenty of authentic logos that can be found both in our book and our website that would have been suitable to use for the Hall of Fame Weekend cap.
That leads me to the present year, 2025, and the Hall of Fame Weekend promotion. Someone within either Major League Baseball, Cooperstown Collection, NewEra, or the National Baseball Hall of Fame had a nice idea to wear historic cap logos for Hall of Fame Weekend. Seriously, I think it’s a nice idea. But they took such a nice idea and ruined it by being lazy, and simply not caring whether the logo they chose for our cap was authentic or not. They’re using a fake logo that has no historical photographic proof, and they’re putting it on field to be seen in front of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of eyeballs. And the cherry on top, MLB, NewEra, and all of the other retailers are swindling their fans by selling merchandise with a fake logo. Like myself 20+ ago, the average person will spend their money on this fake logo simply because they don’t know any better when a logo is authentic or not.
Seriously, we’ve been researching this topic of Cardinals logos for 13 years. In no world can MLB plead ignorance and say they didn’t know the logo they chose is fake. The research is all here on this website, and it’s presented in its entirety for free. We never ask people to subscribe to this website. We don’t ask for donations. You see no advertisements and junk on this website. In the day and age of cash grabs, promotions, and advertisements almost literally everywhere you look, this website presents to you authenticity at the highest level, free of charge. And we do it for the sake of education, for the sake of protecting the St. Louis Cardinals brand, and for the sake of making sure we, the St. Louis Cardinals, continue to visually look authentic in our past, present, and future.
Yet we still see MLB and NewEra continuing to use inauthentic logos in their on-field gear and fan merchandise. So, either the research shown on this website is absolutely meaningless, or MLB is blinder than Don Denkinger. And even with all things said, we’re always willing to accept new research. MLB, NewEra, and the Cooperstown Collection have been selling caps with this bird logo for about 30 years now, so they must have some evidence on how they arrived at this logo. A great baseball historian once told me to show some evidence for our drawings and findings, so we did. You won’t find any pages within our database that doesn’t have photographs and/or newspaper articles to corroborate our findings. So I’ll now offer the same challenge to MLB and NewEra and the Cooperstown Collection. Show us some evidence that this contrivance bird existed in the historical record. I’ll be here waiting, call me when you have it.
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Cardinals Uniforms & Logos 
Saw the caps and couldn’t figure out the inspiration… thank you for this dive into history!
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