When I was 10, I had one: a woolen Yankees hat that made me feel like Mickey Mantle, purchased by mail order. My 10-year-old son has roughly two dozen caps, and studies suggest that the average teenage boy owns at least half a dozen.

Erik Stuebe, who founded Blue Marlin Corp. in 1994 to sell caps with Negro League logos, calls today's expansion-team emblems "hideous." He says: "We gravitated to vintage logos because of the aesthetic: simple, elemental, monochrome graphics. It seems to me that the logos of expansion teams -- the Raptors or the Mighty Ducks, with their 12 colors and cartoon-like characters -- are aimed at kids. Often, they seem technologically driven as well."

Part of the appeal of the old emblems lies in the values they project, the eras they imply -- much less mercenary times, imbued with tradition, resistant to change, before fickle franchise moves and random roster shifts, before free agency and the designated hitter. But on closer examination the simpler times these simple graphics seem to suggest turn out to be a rosy cartoon, as mythical as Cooperstown's own past.

While there's a lot of history attached to these early caps, the logos and emblems of expansion teams are a different story. "Is there a single color they didn't manage to get into the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' logo?" asks Jerry Cohen, founder and owner of Ebbets Field Flannels, the first major manufacturer of retro sports gear. When Devil Rays or Dia-mondbacks are starting out, they confer with design pros before talking to baseball pros. Marketing consultants advise them that teal will pull in women as well as men, that black is hot in urban markets, that metallics are the coming thing. Often a new franchise's choice of logo is more important than its first pick in the expansion draft. That logo must not only look good on the uniform or the program, but on any number of other licensed goods. The potential applications are endless. A friend of mine, a Dallas Cowboys fan, keeps on his coffee table a bowl of M&M candies bearing the team's silver star. A good logo must also play well with others. Often team logos crossbreed as they co-brand with commercial brands -- cartoon character Taz dances across a Yankee cap, Nike's swoosh sails over a Giants logo on a T-shirt.

Logos can also be historical hybrids. In 1962, the New York Mets cleverly tapped local tradition by combining motifs from New York's recently departed National League teams: the Giants' orange intersecting N and Y with Dodgers blue.

Jerry Cohen grew up in New York, rooting for the home teams and gorging himself on local baseball lore, but he became fascinated by the edges of the sport -- the minor leagues, the Negro Leagues. "I was drawn to things with stories," says Cohen, who began selling reproduction caps and garb in 1987. As if colorizing an old film, he began research into the black-and-white-photo world of the Negro Leagues, trying to determine what colors and fabrics they had used.

For marginal leagues Cohen found that few uniforms survived, except among collectors. He also learned that players rarely kept uniforms or remembered their colors. "They can tell you about how a pitcher's curve ball broke on a certain day, but have no idea whether his cap was red or blue." Cohen's Ebbets Field Flannel customers tend to fall into two categories. One group demands maximum authenticity (or as close to an exact replica of the cap that Satchel Paige wore as possible). The other is motivated by fashion and satisfied with simply the flavor of the past, wanting a comfortable product inspired by the original.

Blue Marlin, on the other hand, goes for the style-conscious. The list of celebrities spotted wearing its caps: Leonardo DiCaprio, Beck, Cindy Crawford, Steve Buscemi, Bruce Springsteen -- helped secure its place in the fashion firmament and push sales to around $5 million a year. The company was among the first to bring back the soft, prewar -- style cap. To its first offerings from the Negro Leagues, it has since added the logos of various minor-league teams, Latin American teams, Hawaiian plantation teams, and even prison teams.

Blue Marlin's caps don't claim to be full-fledged reproductions. They have adjustable backs and the name of the team, along with the year, embroidered on the back. They're made of cotton. Original caps were made of wool, as are those worn by today's Major League players. Companies pay for rights to most of the images. The Kansas City Monarch's emblem, for instance, is now owned by the Negro Leagues Base-ball Museum, in Kansas City, Missouri. Royalties run between three and 10 percent.

More retro logos will soon appear. The NFL is working with Cohen on a line from the pre -- Super Bowl American Football League. The Giants are bringing back their 1960s helmet logo. Fubu is reviving emblems from the American Basketball Association of the 1960s and 70s -- the graphic equivalent of disco, some would say.

Traditional team uniforms had their origins in basic letters and fabrics. The White Sox and Red Sox were among the first teams to make the simple distinction of wearing hosiery of a fixed color. And many of the initials and lettering styles -- from the Cubs to the Celtics -- that today seem both individual and traditional were simply pulled out of catalogs or off shelves 70 years ago (although the Celtics attribute their leprechaun to the brother of legendary coach Red Auerbach). The old baseball caps came in different sizes, of course, but their production values were inexact. Their designs were not focus-grouped into existence either; often they were hastily drawn up and sewn on by the equipment manager or a local seamstress pressed into service.

In uniforms, as in team image, longevity builds tradition, overcoming commerce and even 77absurdities. The Yankees Web page suggests its "NY" had beginnings as a plate designed by Tiffany, but old photos show many similar letter treatments that are likelier inspirations. While those of us who recall that New Orleans once had an NBA franchise will never quite get used to the Utah Jazz, the Lakers have built up so much tradition in L.A. that we've forgotten all about the Minneapolis Lakers. And success on the field seems to swell team heraldry into glory: the Green Bay "G" looked wonderful in pictures behind Vince Lombardi, but in the wilderness years between Bart Starr and Brett Favre, you could almost feel that proud letter deflating.

Some team logos evoke lost worlds -- the persistence of the Brooklyn Dodgers legend is the prime example, hailing a borough Before the Fall, the Garden of Ebbets Field before it was razed for a housing project, before greed sent both the Dodgers and the Giants west. But tradition can grow up as quickly as a boy outgrows a fitted cap. 88Time not only mythologizes, it covers up the squalid details of sports business. The more you study the origins of logos and emblems, the more sense you get of the business vagaries of the early days of professional sports. The NFL was born in a meeting held in a used-car dealership; it often missed payrolls. The NBA had teams in cities like Rochester, Sheboygan, and Fort Wayne. Until the late-1960s, the NHL had only six teams. Baseball was characterized even in the Twenties and Thirties by the same cavalier movement of franchises that we've become used to today in football, basketball, and hockey. Even the Yankees began in 1903 as the "Highlanders," a lowly American League franchise from Baltimore that formally took the Yankee name only when they moved to the Polo Grounds 10 years later. They still stood in the shadow of the Dodgers and Giants of the more established National League.

Today, of course, the Yankee logo is the most venerable in sports, and marketers can't keep their hands off it. Not content with special-edition World Series shirts and caps, they've taken to playing with the colors. The Yankee emblem now shows up in malls in all kinds of variants. Walk past Lids, a chain store that depends for its existence on new models of baseball-style hats, and you see lime-green Yankee caps, red Yankee caps, even white-on-white Yankee caps. It's like walking into some vast color-blindness test. One step further are the Chinese logo caps, saying (I think) "NY" or "Brooklyn." Intentional obscurity replaces clarity of allegiance: the idea of such a cap is to elicit a question.

In this environment, seeing the New York Black Yankees logo for the first time commonly produces a double take. "It's an ‘in the know' thing," said the publicist for Blue Marlin. But once you get the full story, seeing, say, Calista Flockhart in a New York Cuban Giants cap is like hearing a high-school band do covers of old R&B hits -- slightly silly.

Professional football began as a fly-by-night operation, says Jerry Cohen; it was no more respectable than wrestling, looked down on by the amateur purists of the college game. Uniforms and helmets were pretty much off-the-shelf until 1946, when Fred Gehrke, running back for the Los Angeles Rams and alumnus of the University of Utah art program, painted gold horns on the team's helmets. Those horns, much evolved, looked as good in last year's Super Bowl as they did when they were fresh off of Gehrke's brush, even if the franchise had moved on to St. Louis. (The bird on the helmets of the old St. Louis franchise, the Cardinals, now peers out absurdly in Arizona.)

What was wonderful about the horns was the way they adapted to the shape of the helmet, its swollen ear guards. Still, other teams were slow to follow. It took several years before the Philadelphia Eagles added silver wings to their helmets. The Colts' horseshoe and the Packers' "G" didn't come on the scene until the late-1950s. It took the televised championship game between the Colts and Giants in 1958 to make the NFL graphics-conscious as well as big business.

The old core of NHL franchises put a lot of stock in their original logos, as solid and foursquare as a good check into the boards: Chicago's Indian chief and Detroit's automobile wheel, which remains, commendably, an old tire-and-spoke affair from a Thirties roadster. The Philadelphia Flyers graphic remains as strong and old-fashioned as the enforcers that the team always seems to put on the ice. Toronto, however, began with a noble 47-point maple leaf. But as the team's Web page explains, over the years the team reduced the number of points on the leaf exponentially, as if laboring under the burden of some obscure Canadian tax on acute angles, turning it from a wonderful botanical fantasy into a banal white silhouette.

Most of hockey's newer franchises, of course, match the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of baseball and the Toronto Raptors of basketball for logotype excess. Sport was always commerce, but what has changed is that logo licensing has become not just big business but one of the vital revenue sources for all the major sports. Baseball expansion teams can now sell merchandise up to two years in advance of their first game, as if royalties were needed to assemble a starter kitty for player salaries. (For a year before the team started playing, the Florida Marlins cap was the hat to have on city streets; after play started, it was never as cool again.)

In such a world, old logos -- like old players -- deserve respect, wherever they show up. It's easy to sneer at the reappearance of the old emblems on yuppie garb as the campy selling of tradition -- thin wine in new bottles. But another view is to admire the persistence of the images themselves. In a media world where the old is plowed under every season, these strong, determined, selfish memes have survived even transplantation and hybridization. "If you build it, they will come," the movie myth has it. But the cornfields that turned into magic diamonds to lure ghost players are now run by the sports version of agribusiness with a different motto: if you mark it, they will buy.

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