Dazadi.com Blog

Today it is obvious that any player of baseball needs a baseball glove to aid in fielding and to protect hands from fast flying balls, but there was a time when glove wearing was seen as unmanly. Players originally wore no gloves at all and simply had to bear the pain and swelling associated with catching pitches, pop flies, and fast grounders.

The very first professional player to wear gloves in a game was Cincinnati Red Stockings catcher Doug Allison in 1870. His hands were already badly hurt from catching eight games in nine days, so he donned a pair of buckskin mittens in hopes of preventing further injury when his team played against the Washington Nationals. He was mocked for doing so, and no professional player dared to wear gloves for another five years.

The second recorded instance of professional glove wearing occurred in 1875 with St. Louis Brown Stockings first baseman Charlie Waitt. He wore just a single glove, with no padding and cut off fingers. The glove was flesh colored in hopes of camouflaging its presence, but it didn’t work and he too suffered ridicule from his barehanded teammates.

Albert Spalding, a pitcher and first baseman from Chicago who also founded the Spalding Sporting Goods company, is credited with taking the first steps toward acceptance of the baseball glove. According to Spalding, the fact that he had gained respect as a player by the time he decided to wear a pair of black gloves in 1877 prevented any mockery he might have suffered. As he wrote in 1911: “I had been playing so long and had become so well known that the innovation seemed rather to evoke sympathy than hilarity.”

After Spalding, players slowly began to understand the benefits of glove wearing. Of course, there were still many holdouts. The last of which was Cincinnati Reds second baseman Bid McPhee, who refused to wear a glove, in spite of its prevalence, from 1882 to 1895. Despite otherwise being an exceptional player and an eventual hall-of-famer, McPhee’s stubborn pride caused him to have an average of forty-five errors per season during those years. In 1896, the year he finally caved in, he had only fifteen.

In the 20’s, as the so called “dead ball era” came to close and baseballs started flying faster, fielders began suffering bruises and cuts despite the gloves. To compensate for the harder throws, glove makers added webbing between the thumb and pointer finger. The faster balls were particularly hard on catchers, who started to wear gloves with extra pillow-like padding to save themselves from harm.

Before the 40’s it was believed that a players needed to be able to move each finger individually in order to effectively catch the ball, but the success of lacing the fingers together quickly changed that perception. It was in this same time that what we know today as the first basemen’s glove started to appear.

By the 1950’s pockets began getting deeper, and methods for sculpting and shaping the glove were being developed. The final evolution of the modern glove took place around the late 50’s and early 60’s, with the development of closed backs for greater glove control, and basket webs so pitchers could easily hide their pitching grip.