Rebel Forces Information

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 ...