YankeesHater.com is owned and operated by a small, privately-held company (Rebel Forces, LLC) based in northern New Jersey. The company’s founder, Michael Moorby—a Red Sox fan—quietly began sketching artwork for the YH caps not long after Aaron Boone’s devastating HR in Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS. Spurred on by the unrelenting punishment from his Yankees-loving colleagues, he negotiated the purchase of the YankeesHater.com domain name and spent the winter of 2003-04 pulling together the various aspects of the fledgling business, such as product development, fulfillment (e.g. the ability to fill orders), promotion, and web content.

Moorby and his brother, John, traveled to Boston for the first Yankees/Red Sox series of 2004, passing out free caps in the areas around Fenway Park and later in Champions Sports Bar in the Marriott Copley Place. Just a few days prior, the company had sent 36 caps to Kevin Millar in the Sox clubhouse with the pipe dream that some small measure of exposure for the cap might be achieved. No one could have predicted what was to follow.

One of the caps in Millar’s batch found its way to the top of Curt Schilling’s head, and a Boston Herald photographer was there to capture the image. The resulting photo pictured Schilling and teammate Keith Foulke watching a Boston Bruins playoff hockey game. But when the Boston Herald readership saw the photo in the next morning’s newspaper, the initial reaction was outrage. The black-and-white photo obscured the red and blue color of the cap, and the angle of the shot made the logo on the cap appear—at first glance—to be that of the hated Yankees. It wasn’t long before the code was cracked.

The New York Times, ironically, was the first major newspaper to properly identify the “YH” logo. In the evening of the same day, ESPN SportsCenter ran a piece on the cap, and magnified the “YH” logo from the Schilling photo. Meanwhile, those associated with YankeesHater.com watched all of this with stunned disbelief. Orders immediately came from nearly every state in the US, as well as from Australia, Japan, Canada, the UK and the Netherlands. The initial inventory of caps sold out in just two hours, creating a backorder situation that was not resolved for several months.

The media attention was intense at the outset, sometimes to the point of being comical. NESN—which broadcasts the Red Sox games to the New England area--contacted John Moorby (the company spokesman) for an interview when the Red Sox visited the Bronx just a few days after the Schilling photo ran. When NESN learned that Moorby was actually attending that day’s game at Yankees Stadium, it dispatched a full camera crew and reporter to John’s awful seats in the last row of the right field upper deck. The interview was broadcast live during the game, creating one of the company’s most memorable moments.

Ultimately, the 2004 season ended the way that all Sox fans hoped it would. When the 2005 season opened, we again delivered three dozen caps to Kevin Millar in the Sox clubhouse. The black and red design of these new “Midnight Kowboy” cap was developed with Mr. Millar in mind. Our small tribute to the player who stirred the drink in Boston during its historic 2004 season, while also helping launch (unintentionally, we’re sure) the business that we were so strongly motivated to create just one year prior.