May 20, 2011
Take care of your glove, and it will take care of you
There are many ways to care for your baseball glove. (photo: Getty Images)
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Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May 2011 issue of New England Baseball Journal.
Tim Rumer played his last minor-league baseball game in 1998, pitching for the Durham Bulls. He still has his glove from that year, his favorite, or his “gamer,” as he calls it, sitting in his office at Mizuno USA. He figures if he needed to suit up and get on the field today, he could still count on his trusty gamer. And probably a few other gloves within close reach, as well.
“For me, when it becomes a tool of the trade, then you take a little bit more care of it,” he says. “I’m an equipment guy. There are equipment guys and there are not equipment guys. And you can tell. The equipment guys really take care of their stuff, and the other guys are like, eh, I can use anything, it doesn’t matter.”
It does matter to Rumer. He was in the minors for nine years, including part of the 1996 season with the Double-A Norwich Navigators, and now he’s a business unit manager in the gloves and equipment department at Mizuno. Taking care of his baseball glove is a matter of course for Rumer, and he suspects he is in the minority.
“I’d be curious to see if you polled 100 kids at a baseball tournament how many actually conditioned their glove regularly,” he said. “Not in January — ‘Oh, we’ve got to bring it out of the mothballs.’ Not in January and not in September, but at least every week or every month in between. Personal experience tells me that it wouldn’t be very many people that fall into that range.”
How long can a baseball glove last? That depends on how you take care of it, and what you use it for. Rumer says the pro players Mizuno supplies will get two gloves a year. They’ll play anywhere between 140 and 150 games a year, plus batting practice, spring training and some miscellaneous time.
“You’re looking at them going through a glove arguably every three and a half months, every four months,” Rumer said.
At the lower levels, you’d expect a glove would get less wear, but that’s not necessarily true. At the youngest levels, a player might outgrow a glove before it can wear out. But Rumer says he has been to travel tournaments where parents complain they just spent upwards of $60 on a glove and it didn’t make it through four months.
“You go, wow, how is that possible?” he said. “Then you go through it, the kid’s playing 125 games a year. And then they have practice three times a week on top of that. So they’re playing as much as big-league guys.”
If you condition your glove and take good care of it, you can make it last a lot longer.
“I would expect at a minimum, you could get through a season with any glove,” Rumer said. “Then after that, it’s how well did you take care of it. Does it just get tossed in the bag or does it get carefully placed so that the palm stays open and it’s not sandwiched shut. Are you conditioning it a little bit every week, every other week?”
Rumer stresses the importance of conditioning over almost anything else. That means buying a leather glove — Rumer believes the natural materials are more durable than synthetics.
“It’s when the leather gets dried out that it starts to deteriorate,” he said. “I’ll look at a dried-out glove and go, ‘Oh, my god, that glove needs a drink.’ You can tell dried out leather from conditioned leather.”
There are plenty of different products you can use to condition a glove. Rumer is partial to Mizuno’s Strong Oil for obvious reason. But he remembers using neatsfoot oil on his glove as a kid, and says even shaving cream with lanolin in it will help if applied often enough. Taking care of leather is much like taking care of your skin, and because baseball is a summer game, a glove can get a lot of time in the hot sun and dry up.
Which product you use is a matter of personal preference, and can affect the feel and even the weight of the glove.
“If you start getting into neatsfoot oil or any other type of oil product, that’s going to make the glove very, very heavy,” Rumer said. “Some people want a well-conditioned, oiled glove and don’t mind the weight. Or some people absolutely hate the weight. If you hate the weight, then I’m leaning more toward shaving cream. That’s still going to give you a little bit of conditioning but none of the weight.”
Where you store your glove is also important.
“If it’s dirty all the time and it gets thrown in the bottom of your bag, and it’s in the trunk of your car, then chances are it’s not going to last very long,” Rumer said. “But if you take care of it and treat it like it’s your baby, if you will, there are hundred-dollar gloves out there on the market today that can last you for quite some time.”
Some players prefer their glove to have that stiff, new feeling. Others want a looser glove, floppy and easy to close. Players get creative with their methods of loosening up a glove. Some just catch with it until it’s broken in. Some will close a ball in it and put it under their mattress at night, or even duct tape it around a ball. The preferred fit can change by position, and by level.
“If you’re a middle infielder, they’re very particular about the shape of their glove,” Rumer said. “So when they field the ball, when they go to reach, that ball’s going to be in the same exact spot every single time. That person’s a little bit different than your typical Little League player who’s not really shaping their glove that much at their age. You start to get into that more late middle school, high school and into college.
Looseness of the laces is also a matter of personal comfort. A lot of players probably won’t replace the laces until one breaks. Re-stuffing is also an option, but usually cost prohibitive.
“There’s a lot of labor involved in that, and you truly need a craftsman to do that,” Rumer said.
That level of dedication is saved for someone like Juan Pierre of the Chicago White Sox, who has been using the same Mizuno glove since his rookie season in 2001. There’s an emotional attachment to it, his first glove with his name on it, a sign that he made the big leagues.
That’s proof that if your glove is important to you, you can make it last.
“That’s his gamer,” Rumer said. “That thing, he takes care of. He conditions it all the time. And that’s it for him. I don’t think he’ll ever play a game in another glove besides his gamer.”
Nick A. Zaino can be reached at feedback@baseballjournal.com
