Mickey Mantle Baseball Glove

The Fascinating History Of The Baseball Glove

When Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay delivered the first pitch of the 2011 All-Star Game, he did so with his usual black Nike Diamond Elite glove on his left hand. On the field with him, the rest of the National League starters represented a handful of the game’s longstanding glove manufacturers: Rawlings, Mizuno, Wilson, Easton and Nike.

A snippet of air time on national television that shows a player flashing some leather would make any glove company proud. Scour the internet message boards and you’ll find posts from fans wanting to know their favorite player’s glove model. In 2010, there were 5.1 million baseball and softball gloves sold in the U.S. that brought in approximately $208.7 million, according to the National Sporting Goods Association’s most recent Sporting Goods Market report. So the baseball glove industry is steady and still growing.

Who would have thought that a glove would evolve from two pieces of leather designed to prevent injury into a multimillion dollar business? And to think, there was a point in time when players were frowned upon for wearing a glove, the very instrument that has become as much a necessity as, say, a baseball bat to America’s pastime, a tool of the trade whose evolution through the 21st century can essentially be brought back to three cornerstone gloves: the Bill Doak glove, the Rawlings XPG and the Wilson A2000.

The history of the baseball glove can be traced back to as early as 1860, when players started to experiment with a glove as a form of protection, often of the brakeman type of glove used by railroad workers.

Cincinnati Red Stockings catcher Doug Allison was one of the first players to wear a buckskin mitten in 1870 after suffering a hand injury, and St. Louis' Charles Waitt was the first confirmed player to don a glove in 1875, although according to MLB official historian John Thorn, Waitt wore a flesh-colored glove in hopes of it going unnoticed.

"He wanted it to be surreptitious use because it was thought unmanly to not catch with bare hands," Thorn says. "Cricket players did not use gloves, so baseball players ought not to. That was the thinking in the 1870s."

But as hand injuries continued to occur, that psyche changed, and by the 1890s baseball gloves were the norm. Several glove experts, including Pittsburg-based Denny Esken, believes no one was credited for inventing the first baseball glove.

"There's plenty dispute, however, over who invented the catcher's glove, because the catcher took the greatest beating," Esken says. "For a catcher to appear in 100 games in a season was considered an incredible marvel of endurance because it was so difficult.

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