I hadn’t even finished my question when Buck Showalter jumped in with his answer, a couple hours before his Mets played a road game in St. Louis last month.
“Oh, hell yes!” he practically shouted, standing in the hallway outside the visitor’s clubhouse at Busch Stadium, surrounded by Mets beat writers. “I’ve still got it. You used to have to oil it after every game. It pretty much rotted out and we had to redo. We had a leather store in town, and the guy would restring it and re-whatever.”
Seems Showalter did indeed remember his first baseball glove, the one his dad picked out for him, the one with Mickey Mantle’s signature right there in the pocket. Showalter might be manager of the Mets now, but back when he was growing up on the little league fields in Florida pretending he was Mickey robbing home runs, he was just a kid with his prized glove.
You know the feeling, don’t you?
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Generations of youth baseball players have grown up using gloves with the stamped signature of their favorite players. Not a week goes by without someone on my Twitter feed seeing a baseball card I post and replying, “I had his glove when I was a kid!” I’ve long been curious about the backstory behind the signature gloves, so I decided to do a bit of research and talk with a few folks who would know. What I found was fascinating.
First, here’s why it matters: The baseball glove is special.
“It’s Christmas whenever you get a new glove,” Mets superstar Francisco Lindor told me, “whether it’s actually Christmas or summer or right before spring season starts.”
Lindor’s first two gloves as a kid were hand-me-downs, a black Mizuno Chipper Jones model and then a SSK Colorway Roberto Alomar model. Then, finally, a Rawlings Trap-Eze, a Rafael Furcal special.
“That was the first glove that was for me,” he said, with his iconic smile. “My cousin had one and I wanted the same glove he had, so I got it.”
A baseball glove is more than a piece of equipment — it represents a relationship.
“Gloves are unique,” said Mike Thompson, the executive vice president of Rawlings Sporting Goods. “Unlike any other product, you have to break it in. You wear it. You have your glove on more than you’re swinging a bat. It’s part of you. It’s how you break it in, how it fits your hand. You personalize it. From that point of view, it evokes emotion. You never hear kids say, ‘I still have my bat!’ But they always say, ‘I still have my glove.’”
Jim Daniel, who runs BaseballGloveCollector.com, can attest.
“Do you know how many people reach out to me through the ‘contact me’ link on the site, guys my age in their 50s or 60s, trying to find the glove they had when they were kids? They’ll say stuff like, ‘I think it had a patch on it,’” Daniel said with a laugh. “The glove is part of your body, part of your arm and part of your hand. The glove is the most personal item, the most personal piece of sporting equipment out there. It really is. Bats are cool, no doubt about it. But they’re not gloves. Gloves are cooler.”
A complicated origin story
My first question when starting this project was simple: Who was the very first player to have a signature in a baseball glove? I hoped the answer would be simple, too.
After weeks of digging through The Sporting News archives to find old advertisements from sporting goods manufacturers, talking with experts in the glove-collecting hobby and those in the glove-making business, here’s the answer: I’m not sure.
More importantly, nobody is 100 percent sure. Like a relationship status in the early days of Facebook, it’s complicated.
“It was always thought to be Ty Cobb and (Honus) Wagner,” Daniel said. “It was widely known that Wagner was one of the first endorsers for Spalding bats and (Goldsmith) gloves, and things like that. But then we found that Stall & Dean out of Massachusetts had a Ty Cobb in their 1914 catalog. So we thought 1914 was a good place to make a line in the sand, then we looked through more catalogs and Rawlings, in 1913, they have a Gibson and a Kern mitt.”
If anyone would know, it’s Daniel. He owns and operates the definitive website on the glove-collecting hobby, BaseballGloveCollector.com. His site has thousands of pages of PDFs of old equipment catalogs from Spalding, Rawlings, A.J. Reach, Draper & Maynard, Stall & Dean, Goldsmith and others. And there are thousands of pictures of vintage gloves on the site; basically, any legitimate vintage glove that has come up for auction or been sold in any public way is pictured and labeled on Daniel’s site.
But here’s the thing: The glove-collecting hobby is still relatively new. Joe Phillips is considered the godfather of the hobby, which he helped introduce to the world starting with a 1991 Sports Illustrated article that featured Phillips and his obsession. He eventually passed down all his research to Daniel, who had immersed himself into the passion a few years after Phillips’ article published.
So, yeah, the hobby is basically just 30-something years old, and there are still discoveries — more catalogs, more actual gloves — waiting to be found. And that’s part of the excitement for Daniels and those who share his passion. But now we’ve started to lose focus. It’s easy to do. To be honest, it happened to me dozens of times researching and writing this piece, because there are so many fascinating rabbit holes with enticing bait.
The name evolution
Let’s start with what we know that we know. And to be clear, I am almost exclusively referring to the exhaustive work done by Phillips, Daniel and collectors such as Jeff Mann, whose Spalding collection is jaw-dropping. We’ll get to Mann and Spalding soon.
In 1913, the Rawlings catalog (have to register for free to see the link) has two endorsed catchers mitts. “The Kern’s Catcher’s Mitt” is shown on Page 3, and though there is no first name given, it’s named for Butch Kern, a minor league catcher from St. Louis — remember, Rawlings was founded in St. Louis and still is headquartered in the suburbs — who played professional baseball, mostly in the Midwest, from 1909 to 1924, according to his Baseball-Reference page. On the picture in the catalog, though, there’s no trace of his name or signature on the glove.
On Page 4 is “The Gibson New Design Catchers’ Mitt” and “The Gibson Mitt” is stamped on the heel, the first known name on a glove. It’s not a signature, though. Here’s what is written in the description: “Has been thoroughly tried by leading catchers, endorsed by George Gibson, catcher of the Pittsburgh team, and pronounced the best Mitt on the market.”
So that’s an officially endorsed mitt by George Gibson, with his name on the glove.
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But, again, not a signature. We didn’t get excited looking at our gloves as kids because there was some dude’s name stamped in the pocket in block letters. For the good stuff, we move to 1914 and the Stall & Dean catalog. For $3.50, you could get a glove used and endorsed by Ty Cobb in three different finger-wriggling colors: brown calfskin, drab buckskin and black calfskin. Tris Speaker has used-and-endorsed gloves, too; a “drab buckskin” ran $4. Both had signatures on the heel, and both the Cobb and Speaker gloves are iconic in the industry, a little like 1952 Topps cards in the trading card hobby.
In Goldsmith’s 1915 catalog, we find the Chief Meyers model catcher’s mitt “designed personally” by the New York Giants’ catcher. Like the Gibson glove in the 1913 Rawlings catalog, “Chief Meyers Model” is stamped in block letters on the mitt. As was often the case in these early catalogs, there’s a testimony from the player. The letter’s dated May 19, 1914.
P. Goldsmith's Sons,
In the game today with The Cincinnati Club with Mathewson pitching, I used the Model C.M. Catchers Mitt, made for me by your firm yesterday. In my many years of experience, I have never had a Catchers Mitt that I could use without extensive breaking in. The perfect balance, deep pocket, and excellent leather makes it The Finest Mitt I have ever caught with.
On May 19, 1914, Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson did indeed start in Cincinnati, picking up the win with a complete-game effort, with seven hits and two runs allowed. Meyers, his catcher, went 1-for-2 with a pair of walks in the 5-2 victory for the Giants. The box score lists no errors for Meyers — and no wild pitches for Matty — so we have to assume he really was happy with the glove.
The catalogs from baseball equipment manufacturers are invaluable resources, but they’re not infallible resources. What does that mean? Let’s compare the Ty Cobb write-ups in the 1912 and 1914 Stall & Dean catalogs. Both use nearly identical images, with a photo of Cobb’s stoic mug superimposed in the pocket of the glove, above the words “Stall & Dean” on one row, Cobb’s signature on another row and the model number on the bottom.
Judging by those pictures, you’d think both year’s models — the actual, physical gloves — might look identical, right? But check the descriptions.
In 1912: "Made in five colors on our celebrated Ty Cobb pattern which incorporates his original ideas.”
In 1914: "This glove is used and endorsed by Ty Cobb, made after his ideas and suggestions."
See the difference? If the 1912 model was truly endorsed — that’s a powerful word — by Cobb, Stall & Dean would have trumpeted that fact instead of just saying it was the “Ty Cobb pattern,” right?
And I know what you’re thinking here: What about the 1913 catalog? Well, folks, that’s another issue. As far as Daniel knows — and, again, if anyone would know, he would — no copies of the 1913 Stall & Dean catalog exist, so nobody knows for sure if the change was made in 1913 or 1914.
And here’s the thing with the images and words superimposed over images of gloves in catalogs: If those were taken as absolute gospel, we wouldn’t be talking about 1913 Rawlings or 1914 Stall & Dean. Let’s step back to 1909, when the Shapleigh Hardware catalog had a Tom Jones basemen’s mitt and an E.K. Spencer catcher’s mitt. Those gloves had both a mug shot and signature on the gloves in the catalog, but they weren’t actually on the gloves. Those did come with a signature of some sort, though.
“The Mitt is made is exact accordance with a pattern submitted by E.K. Spencer, one of the leading catchers of the American League has a tag attached, bearing the signature of E.K. Spencer, as a guarantee of genuineness and high quality.”
So, a tag signature. That’s new. Probably. Daniel said none of those have turned up, either.
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And in 1910, the Norvell-Shapleigh catalog took things up a notch, with a glove named the “Lajoie Autograph Model.” That seems official, right? The picture for model G400 shows Napoleon Lajoie’s autograph on the heel, in a way that sure looks different from the other gloves in either the 1909 or 1910 catalogs. But …
“There’s never been one to turn up in the history of baseball glove collecting,” Daniel said. “That would be the holy grail, if it ever did show up.”
Again, though, we’re getting sidetracked.
A drip, then a flood
The Bill Doak glove, made by Rawlings, is another iconic creation. It’s a patented design. Heck, the date of the patent is right there on the glove, on the back-of-the-hand clasp: “Aug. 22nd, Nov. 21st, 1922.” Rawlings was producing the gloves before the patent was official, of course. Searching though The Sporting News archives, the earliest advertisement I found for the Doak glove was on Page 7 of the March 31, 1921, issue.
What was revolutionary about the Doak glove? In earlier models, there was a piece of leather — referred to collectors now as a “full web” or “one-inch web” — between the thumb and index finger, sewn into the glove. With the Doak model, Rawlings put eyelets on the edges of the thumb and index finger and leather laces to create a more flexible, forgiving pocket. It was an instant hit.
“Maybe this is a little bit of folklore passed down,” Thompson said with a grin, sitting in the conference room at Rawlings headquarters, “but I believe it was Doak’s idea and he brought it to Rawlings and we collaborated together and we worked out a business deal. From there, that put gloves in motion, the ‘technology’ of the day.”
More importantly to our story — again, the temptation to veer off course is strong — Bill Doak’s signature was right there on the heel of the glove (at least, originally; on many surviving gloves, that signature has long since worn off). As it should have been.
Doak, a pitcher, was loyal to Rawlings, but that wasn’t always the case with ballplayers and their gloves. Tris Speaker was a featured player in the Stall & Dean catalogs, but there he was in the 1915 Goldsmith catalog, too. Few played that game more than Babe Ruth, though. Daniel laughed as he tried to run down the Babe’s glove allegiances/endorsements.
Ruth started with Draper & Maynard (known as D&M) from 1921 to 1925, but appeared in the Wilson catalog in 1924-25, too, because why would Ruth turn down money? Most D&M advertisements in The Sporting News in the 1920s claimed that “Over 90 % of Major League Players use D&M Gloves or Mitts” and the ad in the Oct. 9, 1924, issue goes so far as to list 20 Senators and 22 Giants — the two teams that met in the World Series — who use D&M.
Ruth landed with A.J. Reach, too, at some point in the 1920s and then took Spalding’s money in 1927, which just so happened to be when his Yankees were pretty darn good.
Mann, the Spalding super-collector and an unofficial company historian, owns documents that show Spalding paid Ruth $3,235 in 1928 and $5,751 in 1929, and as far as Mann can tell, it was solely for glove endorsements. Those were, of course, HUGE sums of money for ballplayers, and shows Spalding’s desire to have the biggest names in the sport endorse its products.
“Spalding jumped on the Ruth bandwagon,” Mann said.
It’s also why it’s a bit perplexing — and maybe you’ve noticed this — that we had yet to mention Spalding in the signature gloves world yet. The A.G. Spalding & Bros. company was started by Al Spalding, with its first store opening in Chicago in 1876, while he was still one of the sport’s star players. Spalding was a pitcher — he turned in a 2.01 ERA in 312 games (293 starts) from 1872 to 1876 — and quite the hitter, too, playing first base after his arm gave out. He retired with a lifetime .313 batting average. He's in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a Pioneer/Executive.
And he had a knack for marketing and innovation that few could match. Spalding told a story in his book, “America’s National Game,” about the first time he wore a glove on the field, back in the days when men played the game bare-handed. Spalding noticed — in 1875, according to baseball historian John Thorn — St. Louis first baseman Charlie Waitt wearing a glove, almost in secrecy.
“He went to first base wearing a flesh-colored glove with a large opening that he had expanded on the back of it for ventilation, and the reason he wore a flesh colored glove was because he was getting ridiculed by fellow players, opposing players, the fans, you know, everybody for wearing this glove,” Mann said. “So, Spalding looked at this and said, you know what, I'm gonna wear a glove and I'm gonna wear a black glove so that people will notice it because I know they won't ridicule me.”
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And if they noticed Spalding, one of the game’s biggest stars, wearing a glove, maybe they’d want to buy one from him, too. All Spalding gloves, of course, had the name of the company stamped in the leather, but does that count as a player signature? Probably not. Spalding’s equipment company grew by leaps and bounds every year, and the Spalding bats had endorsements on them for a long time before a Spalding glove ever did.
But it was a full decade after Rawlings’ Gibson mitt that Spalding joined the autograph party. Until then, Spalding models — and they had a ton of them — had names such as World Series, League Extra, Inter-City, Professional Jr., Mascot, Public School and Boys’ Favorite, just to name a few. No players, though.
“It’s just a gap that’s unexplainable,” Mann said.
The first hints of a name on a Spalding glove show up in 1923, with two models, the EC and the Rabbit. While nothing’s official, Mann said the “EC” is named for Eddie Collins — he has one in his collection — and the “Rabbit” is for Rabbit Maranville. In 1926, Spalding came out with Frankie Frisch and Stanley Harris gloves, and then in 1927 the Babe Ruth Home Run Special glove made its debut for Spalding. In future years, Spalding Ruth gloves came with “Babe Ruth’s own book of advice for young players,” which would have been mind-blowing for kids of the day. Together, the glove and the book cost $2.95.
(from The Jeff Mann Collection)
Rawlings started compiling a large stable of players in the post-Ruth days, thanks largely to the efforts of Oscar Roettger. He might have only played a total of 37 games in the majors — six for the Yankees in 1923-24 as a pitcher, five for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1927 as an outfielder/pinch-hitter and 26 for the Philadelphia A’s in 1932, mostly as a first baseman — but he spent parts of 18 seasons in the minors and knew just about everybody in the game.
So it was pretty natural that he’d start working for Rawlings — he was from St. Louis, just like the company — when he retired. Roettger would load up a trunk or two every spring, packed full with Rawlings gloves, and go from camp to camp. Some guys, he’d sign to a Rawlings endorsement contract for the cost of a free glove. For some guys, a glove and a couple of bucks. The best of the Roettger recruits wound up with their own signature in a glove one day.
“He started assessing players, lining up who were the best players,” Thompson said. “You couldn’t give everybody a glove because there were just too many. Oscar used to say, ‘Everybody wants a Rawlings glove, I just can’t give them all away for free.’”
And not every player was worthy of a Rawlings glove, Roettger reasoned.
“In the 1940s and then in the 1950s is when it really started to get big,” he said. “A lot of Cardinals, too. Pepper Martin, and Musial was the big name, if you will. Then in the ’50s came Mickey Mantle. And Mickey Mantle was an anchor for us, with a lot of other great players. Warren Spahn, too. The ’70s was when it just exploded, with all those great ’70s and ’80s Hall of Famers, we had most of them. Mike Schmidt, Willie Stargell, Johnny Bench, those types.”
A connection to heroes
Folks, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but chances are strong that the glove you used in Little League was not an exact replica of the one used by the player whose signature was in the pocket of the glove.
I’m really sorry. The clue probably should have been the right-handed Steve Avery glove in the ’90s.
It’s not a new thing, either. The Babe Ruth gloves Spalding paid him handsomely to endorse? There were a couple of different models; the WW model was higher-end, and the MO model was a bit lower end, aimed at middle and high-school players.
The MO model wasn’t even based off Ruth at all, Mann said: “The MO goes back a few years, before the Ruth signature popped up on it. They were already making those gloves. They just added the embossed Babe Ruth Home Run Special endorsement on it.”
If you were a sandlot baseball star really anytime from the 1970s through the 1990s? Chances are your glove wasn’t the first with that signature.
“Everybody knows the Reggie Jackson model, which was an RBG36, and that RBG36, there’s probably been more of those sold than any model in the history of glove-making, but the names have changed over time,” Thompson said. “There has been a lot of really great players on that model. There’s been Reggie Jackson, Dale Murphy, Ken Griffey Jr. At one point that was a premier glove for Walmart, because they would just blow these things out. It was an all-leather glove, a great glove, 12 or 12 1/2-inch. You could use it for a lot of different positions, so a kid could use it for the outfield or infield.”
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Thompson, who has been with Rawlings for 38 years years, said that even though it might not be the exact glove the big leaguers use, the company does try to emulate what the pros use, with some “connective element.” Basically, you won’t find a Mike Trout catcher’s mitt or a Francisco Lindor first-baseman’s glove.
The world of baseball gloves is different now. The price points have jumped a bit from the $2.95 Spalding charged for the Babe Ruth Home Run Special (and book!). I played around with the customization options on the Rawlings website and, wow. Now, in addition to picking just about any color combination you want, you can get your own name stitched into the back of the glove, which is cool.
In reporting this story, I’ve talked to and interacted with dozens of folks who instantly know the signature in their first glove, even if they might not have thought about it in years. And each time, there’s a twinge of jealousy that stings. Showalter’s answer damn near killed me. See, I don’t remember the signature in my first glove. My first glove was my dad’s old softball glove, and whatever signature might once have existed was long gone by the time I started using it.
There’s a picture of me as a kid, kneeling on the ground with the mop of blond hair (those were the days) under my red cap. I’m wearing a red Y-Winners T-shirt (for some reason the glove on the logo only has three fingers?), and my dad’s old glove not only envelopes my left knee, it damn near hides me entire lower half. It’s massive on little kid Ryan’s hand.
Didn’t care. You should see the smile on my face. I was playing baseball, using my dad’s glove. Life was good.
