At first, it looks like something went wrong during the production of a new cap for the Philadelphia Phillies.
The tan hat shows the team’s script letter P logo in white, but just to the logo’s left, a jagged stitching line scribbles its way up and to the side, with two small dots embroidered at the top of the line and near the bottom. On one side of the cap, there’s a jumble of words and letters that don’t immediately make sense.
You might wonder, Did the hat factory’s embroidery machine hallucinate in the middle of the job? And then it strikes you, like a clapper strikes a bell: The seemingly haphazard stitching is not a defect. It’s a historical reference to the most famous bell in the MLB team’s hometown.
New Era designed the custom Liberty Bell-inspired Phillies caps specifically for the 2026 MLB All-Star Game played on July 14 at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty where the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago this month. Available exclusively at the Phillies Store for the All-Star Game celebrations, New Era tells Fast Company the hats were already sold out on the eve of the big game.
“New Era led a design lab with the Phillies, and this cap design emerged from that process,” says John Mackowiak, a spokesman for New Era.
The Liberty Bell got its name beginning in 1835 from abolitionists who adopted it as a symbol in their fight to end slavery, and exactly when it got its famous crack is lost to history, but it had to be recast twice. It often rang out on national events, like the signing of the Constitution, and following the deaths of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, according to the National Constitution Center.
The bell was damaged following Washington’s birthday in 1846 and wouldn’t ring again. Though its sound is silenced, the bell still stands today as a symbol of America’s founding and the fight to make good on the Declaration of Independence’s words, “all men are created equal.” As a tourist destination, it attracts about 2 million visitors annually.
New Era’s cap faithfully re-creates the shape of the crack on the front, and the text on the side is actually a label that appears on the Liberty Bell about who made it, where, and when for its 1753 recasting. The words “Pass and Stow” reference metalworkers John Pass and John Stow, casters of the new bell; “Philada” is for Philadelphia; and “MDCCLIII” is 1753 in Roman numerals.
There are other Easter eggs designed into the cap, too. The year “1776” is stitched into the bottom of the bill, and on the inside of the cap there’s some funny, ahistorical artwork showing the Phillie Phanatic mascot at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The furry, green, snout-faced mascot was voted the most-loved MLB mascot in a sportsbook’s national fan survey released last month.
New Era designed more than 500 hats and other products for America’s 250th anniversary, including sets that fill in team logos with stars-and-stripes patterns or a bald eagle carrying a U.S. flag in its talons. (Even the MLB’s lone Canadian team, the Toronto Blue Jays, got its own “USA 250” hat). None reference the country’s anniversary as cleverly or creatively as the Phillies Liberty Bell-inspired cap, though. For such a small shape, the crack on the front tells a larger story.
