Your Next Baseball Glove
by Martin Kleinman
I need a new baseball glove like a hole-in-the-head (or “luch in kup” as my Yiddish-speaking Granny would say). But I’m going to buy a new mitt, and it’s a beaut, at Dick’s Sporting Goods. I wish I had a glove like this when I was a kid, playing sandlot ball at Harris Field.
(Maybe it sounds stupid, but I want to encourage that retailer, Dick’s, for doing good. See Dick’s Take a Principled Stand. Go, Dick’s, Go!)
I used to play first-, second- and third-base in the NYC agency softball leagues. One year, I was MVP of my team. That was many moons ago and I haven’t swung a bat in a good 10 years. BUT: I think I’m gonna buy this glove, even if I just wear it in my living room, loudly flinging a ball into the pocket, while I watch the Yankees.
Do you remember your first glove? I sure do. Mine was a six-finger model, purchased at Davega on Fordham Road, just off Jerome Avenue. It cost $4.06 (including tax). It was stiff as a board and I wished I had the money for a cool Rawlings Trap-EZE like my 190th Street friends had. One year, Jamsie got a pro model catcher’s mitt, a big leather brick that was impossible to break in, given the (low) velocity of our little kid throws. The ball would hit the glove, make a “thunk” sound, and bounce out.
Then one hot summer day, after playing long-toss and flies up in the field behind P.S. 86, I found a dreamy, perfectly broken-in Rawlings four-finger Hank Bauer glove just lying there in the dirt. No name on it. I looked around the field; there was no one else there. I took it home. It served me well, until this pudgy pillow of leather disintegrated in the spring of my 16th year.
My graduation from De Witt Clinton High School that same June went largely unnoticed by my family so, in consolation, I used money earned as a page at the Bainbridge Avenue branch of the NYPL to buy a $16 MacGregor mitt, a Claude Osteen model, at Paragon on 17th Street. This was back when Paragon was a simple sports store with a kickass selection of bats and gloves, and was far from the Eataly of pricy sports equipment it is today. “Best in the Field” was optimistically etched into the leather. I was not. “Best in the field,” that is.
But, man, I could hit.
At the batting cages on the eastern end of Pelham Parkway, near the stables, I was the guy people would crowd around. I boomed out shot after shot into the netting far away.
Once in the working world, I played for my agency in professional leagues. I served as a ringer on my sister-in-law’s publishing league team once, and blasted a homer and a triple. Over the years, my footwork and, therefore, fielding improved. Inevitably, my MacGregor fell apart after decades of use and multiple re-lacings, and I treated myself to a huge $40 Spalding softball glove, about as big as a jai alai cesta, purchased at Triangle Sports on Flatbush Avenue, near today’s Barclay’s Center.
I played softball, touch football, pickup hoops and tennis well into my forties. Then the injuries started, in ’97. First a broken wrist and torn cartilage, sustained during an inelegant, early morning ice skating flop in Prospect Park. In ’04 came back-to-back bicycle accidents: a separated shoulder in my throwing arm and, just after completing rehab, a torn bicep tendon in the same arm. Total hip replacement, left, in ’05, and four years later, my right hip was titanium-ized as well. My eye injury in ’07 didn’t resolve for six months. The final straw was a total foot drop in ’12, cured by an L4/L5 discectomy and laminectomy.
No more baseball, skating, skiing, touch football. I’m reduced to playing tennis doubles; I’m the guy with the massive black knee brace on my unstable knee (the one operated on 20+ years ago), the big serve, the killer forehand, and the (very) limited mobility. But I’m still out there.
The new season approaches and the Yankees reloaded and look like contenders, for as long as their front-line pitching holds up.
Me? I’m a grey beard now, held together with spit and duct tape, just like Tanaka’s arm. Nevertheless, on this blustery and cold nor’easter day, my twenty-year old Spalding softball glove is beside me as I type this, along with an old, scarred Clincher.
And, ever the optimist, I think: maybe I should treat myself to a new glove. For each new baseball season represents renewal, a chance for great things to happen.
That Nocona looks sweet. Or, maybe a Wilson A2000. Or a black Rawlings Trap-EZE “Heart of the Hide” glove. I need it like a hole-in-the-head, for sure, but wouldn’t it be a neat thing to have, as I watch my team for the next seven months (and hopefully longer).
Whatever mitt I choose, it will come from Dick’s Sporting Goods, a company that gives me good cause for optimism. This conservative big box store did the right thing, as should we all.
Baseball is around the corner and hope springs eternal. Buy a new glove. Why the blank not?
What will yours be?
