There's a glaring error on New Era's "Local Market" cap for the Kansas City Royals. The cap, which includes area codes where the team's fans live is missing Kansas City's 816 area code. Also missing in action is our 660 area code.

In fact, according to Fox 4, no Missouri area codes are represented. Even though the hat contains the Kansas City Missouri flag and the state outline of Missouri. While the missing 816 area code seems like rookie mistake of not asking anyone with the Royals organization to look at the hat. Or a New Era employee not looking in a Kansas City phonebook. Or typing in "Kansas City, Missouri Area Code" on Google. I want to speak up to those of us in the 660 area code.

While Sedalia is Cardinals Country. There are still Royals fans in Sedalia. And Warrensburg is way more a Royals town than a Cardinals town. And the 660 area code. According to Wikipedia it's a split of the 816 area code. So yeah, if New Era is going to fix the hat they better include the 660 area code too.

When I looked at the Cardinals hat, the only area code represented is 314. Excuse me? I'm not part of Cardinals nation. But I've lived in places where Cardinals nation is strong. Like the 217 area code covering Champaign and Springfield Illinois. Lot's of Cardinals fans there. And the 563  area code of the Quad Cities. Lot's of Cardinals fans there too. And what about the area code of Columbia and Jeff City? Isn't that Cardinals country as well? And don't forget the 618 area code in Southern Illinois right across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.

I then looked at the Cubs version of the hat, which includes most of Illinois, which is about right. Although it doesn't include the Quad Cities 563 area code for the Iowa cities. It does include the 309 area code for the Illinois side of Quad Cities. However, a glaring error with the Cubs hat is excluding the 815 area code serving Joliet, Kankakee and other parts of Cubs country.

I could have kept going down the rabbit hole trying to see what other mistakes New Era made with the caps. But someone at New Era must of gotten the message as the story about the Royals local market cap started to go viral. They not only pulled the Royals version of the hat, but every teams version of the hat.

The story became so big even the Royals changed their Twitter bio to poke fun at the issue.


The closest design I saw to the "Local Market" cap is something New Era calls the "CIty Patch" hat which has similar artwork to the "Local Market" on the side of the cap. Oh and they didn't bother to include the area codes. Perhaps that's for the best. Fox 4 got some screen grabs of the "Local Market" cap before New Era pulled the hats off their website.

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