kingjammy24
08-21-2007, 04:54 PM
an old story from 2001 i ran across:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Selcraig, 03.05.01
In the first days of spring, when baseball's stallions gather in Florida and Arizona to shake off their winter slumber, a sweet ritual takes place in most clubhouses that offers a small, reaffirming moment for those who mourn the game's lost innocence.
The young millionaires will be sitting in their jocks before practice one morning watching ESPN or playing cards, when an awe-struck fellow from an overnight delivery service appears at the door bearing a pile of cardboard boxes. Suddenly the room's aloof bravado evaporates and the heroes become nine-year-olds at Christmas. Boxes burst open. Plastic bags litter the floor. And soon all you hear are the sounds of big fists pounding leather.
The new gloves have arrived.
Aroma experts and saddle-sniffing cowboys would agree—something about the smell of new leather beckons a man as surely as any Brazilian thong. Like Little League dads at a sporting goods store, big leaguers will plunge their fingers into the new mitts, tug on the stiff lacing a bit and then, helpless before eons of instinct, they bury their noses deep in the pockets and inhale, eyes closed, as if summoning thoughts of Anna Kournikova. Oh, sure, they'd rather watch Brideshead Revisited than admit to such sentimentality, but each in his own way is reviving memories of a kid's game that too often is all about money. New cowhide brings flooding back the thoughts of unspoiled things, of patient dads and boundless potential. And so, on a pilgrimage of sorts, I went to find those places where everyone understands a lifelong glove affair.
Deep in the Missouri Ozarks near the Arkansas border is a busy, blue-collar village of creeks and hardwoods called Ava, where I like to imagine the town's 1,383 families sit around dinner tables discussing the Deep-Well Pocket and the Trap-EZE Web. Here in a one-story redbrick factory that smells the way Cooperstown should, the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company makes gloves for the best players on the planet.
Rawlings has been making gloves since 1888. It supplies more than half of all major-league baseball players and still leads the retail trade with 70 plus models, followed by Wilson, Mizuno, and smaller labels like Zett, SSK, Louisville Slugger, Franklin, Easton, Nokona and 20 others. (Some companies, like The Sports Doctor, even specialize in custom-made or vintage gloves.) Sadly, of more than 2 million gloves Rawlings sold last year, only about 20,000 came from Ava. The rest were made in Rawlings' plants in the Philippines, China, Indonesia and Thailand. (Texas-based Nokona, which also crafts beautiful high-end gloves, is the only sizeable company that still makes all of its gloves in America.)
Specifically, Rawlings only makes gloves in Ava that come from what it calls "Heart of the Hide" leather, a fine grade usually from Black Angus steers raised in the upper Midwest that have no cattle brands, tick marks or barbed-wire scratches. Imagine their posthumous pride when Chicago's Horween Leather Company, which supplies all HOH leather, selects their once-blubbery hides for tanning, a nasty process involving sulfuric acid, salt and autopsy-like odors. One mitt requires about six square feet of leather, so Ava's workers can usually get three-and-a-half gloves out of one hide, which consists of the side of one animal from shoulder to butt. For Rawlings' best gloves, which cost about $170 retail, only steers, not cows, will do. When cows carry calves, explains Rawlings executive Chuck Malloy, their hides usually become too thin or wrinkled, which makes their leather more suitable for cheaper gloves that may also contain pigskin or vinyl.
This brings us to a troubling moral issue that serves as a tidy metaphor for the decline of American civilization. Flimsy baseball gloves.
If you're old enough to remember Sandy Koufax, you've no doubt noticed that most of today's gloves don't last as well as pre-'70s models. The lacing breaks more easily and they get weak and floppy, like wet oven mitts, a lot quicker. Glovemasters joke that, "They just don't make cows like they used to." True, but there's more to it.
Leather experts explain that today's inactive, rushed-to-slaughter, feedlot cattle don't have hides as strong and mature as '60s range cattle. But more distressing is that the era of instant gratification (and more single moms as glove buyers for Little Leaguers) now requires glovemakers to give kids a product they can easily flex in the store and play with right away. Companies do this by using thinner hides, oil-treating the leather and using less padding. Nearly gone are the days when it took two months of careful nurturing and playing catch to make a glove. Companies obviously sell more gloves this way. Purists are aghast.
"It's a throwaway generation," says Rawlings' head glove designer, Bob Clevenhagen, an Ozarks native whose cinder-block office at the Ava factory is a memorial to gloves that endure.
"These guys kept their gloves a long time," Clevenhagen tells me as he pulls open a drawer from a bank of gray metal file cabinets. Inside are worn manila envelopes containing the patterns and design notes for virtually every glove Rawlings has ever made, from fingerless gloves of the 1880s to the 1920 Bill Doak model that turned gloves into more than mere hand-protectors to the black Trap-EZE style made famous by Junior Griffey.
He can faithfully reproduce any of those gloves and, consequently, has gotten requests to make everything from George Bush's old Yale mitt to authentic Black Sox–era models for Field of Dreams and, recently, three Mickey Mantle models for actor Billy Crystal.
"But those are easy," Clevenhagen says, tossing me what looks like an assembly-line reject that has no thumb or pinky. Then he hands me a mother's letter with a tracing of her six-year-old's mangled left hand on notebook paper. "These are the tough ones," he says. "I get requests all the time from parents of children who have deformities. We always do what we can.… We do 'em for free."
On a rainy spring morning the Ava factory is churning out some softball gloves—softballers, especially girls' scholastic leagues, now make up one of the largest segments of the glove-buying public—and a few special orders for major leaguers like Craig Biggio, Tony Gwynn and Griffey. It's no big deal for the workers that they're stitching up a future Hall of Famer's glove, but when Clevenhagen stops by a final inspection station and hands me Griffey's nearly finished personal mitt, the Rawlings PRO-TB, I do briefly think, "Who here could possibly outrun me to that exit sign?"
Making a glove is a labor-intensive, 35-step process that can take 20 minutes to an hour for a dozen workers, all of whom develop fast, strong hands while trying to avoid repetitive stress injuries. First, the Horween hides, which cost Rawlings roughly $3.50 to $4 a square foot, are graded for their thickness—the thickest hides go to catchers' and first basemen's mitts, which take the most pounding. Using short heavy hydraulic presses called "clickers," workers punch out the leather outlines of the palm, back, fingers and linings, plus a dozen smaller pieces, then emboss all the parts with numbers and names, and sew everything together inside-out to hide the stitching. About a third of the way through, the unwieldy five-fingered monster must be turned outside-out, which is something akin to putting a queen-size sheet on a king-size mattress. "I have a woman do this," Clevenhagen says. "It takes a lot more technique than brute strength."
You can't even fit your fingers into a newly sewn glove because the inner leather linings are bunched so tightly, so workers heat up oversized aluminum "hands" to 250 degrees and slide each finger of the glove over the hot metal prongs. From here you sew in some dense gray felt padding and lace in the all-important webbing and the fingers, give it a final inspection and you're basically ready for the big time. Hum-babe hum-babe.
If you ever go to the San Francisco Giants' spring training camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, to interview players about their gloves, these are among several questions I would avoid:
Is that a junior cup you're wearing?
What's up with those syringes?
May I try on your glove?
Players might be finicky about their wives and their cars, but they're really sensitive about their gloves. "My fingers better be the only ones that go into this," the Giants' ball-crushing left-fielder, Barry Bonds, said as he showed me his 13-inch, black-and-tan Wilson with a wristband dial-thingy that adjusts its tightness.
Baseball holy men may over-romanticize some things, but there is no deeper relationship between athlete and inanimate object than there is between a major leaguer and his glove. No football helmet or hockey mask approaches this level of trust and love. "When I find a good one," Giants coach Robby Thompson says, "I call it my ‘sweet pud.' "
"It's like the girl you marry," says Giant second baseman Jeff Kent, who has used the same model, an 11-inch Rawlings 5X BCB, since 1989, when he was in the minors. "I could be blindfolded and have a hundred gloves in front of me," Kent says, "and I would know mine." As would they all. Some players, like Wade Boggs, have used the same glove for more than a decade—repairing it often, of course—and others, like the phenomenal ex-Cardinal shortstop Ozzie Smith, change gloves about every six weeks (in Smith's case, because he actually liked the stiffer feel of new leather).
Virtually every major leaguer has a glove endorsement deal. They range from the lowly (two new gloves per year, plus maybe some golf clubs) to the average ($10,000 to $20,000) to baseball's most lucrative (so far), the deal Rawlings has with Griffey, which pays $100,000-plus annually—barely more than cab fare for players making $15 million a year. These fees might be bigger except that gloves don't generate the retail revenue of, say, golf equipment, and glove logos don't often dominate your TV screen, like those on a PGA Tour golfer's bag, hat and shirt. Curiously, despite the fact that some 400 major leaguers make $1 million or more annually and hardly need a glove deal's pocket change, many have signed with companies that clearly produce lower-quality gloves. "You'd be amazed," Clevenhagen says, "at the number of multimillionaires who use $30 gloves."
When a player's new glove arrives in the spring a tactile courtship begins. Outfielders often stick both their pinky and ring fingers in the pinky finger slot of the glove to make the pocket collapse more securely around the ball; middle infielders, however, need to get rid of the ball quickly, so most wear their gloves down onto their palms for more fingertip control. Infielders like small nimble gloves—usually 11.5 inches or less, measured from the heel to the top of the index finger—and outfielders tend to go for those 13-inch jai alai baskets that are, technically, illegal. (Major League Baseball's Rule 1.14 states that gloves shall not be "more than 12 inches" long, but it's never enforced, so don't try making any citizen's arrests.)
Most major leaguers work with at least three gloves—a workhorse for practice, a backup for emergencies and the prized "gamer," which is so valued by players that on team flights most keep them in their carry-on bags rather than stow them with team equipment. "We play lots of practical jokes on each other," says Kent's infield mate, Giant shortstop Rich Aurilia, recalling some novel uses for petroleum jelly, "but it's just understood that you never mess around with a guy's glove."
Unlike a jersey, bat or ball, a leather glove actually retains the shape of the athlete's body—in this case the most important tools in baseball, the hands—so it's perfectly reasonable that actor Billy Crystal paid $239,000 at a Sotheby's auction for a 1960 Rawlings glove worn by his childhood hero, Mickey Mantle. After being pounded by hundreds of thousands of thrown balls, baked in the sun and soaked in sweat and leather conditioner for much of his career, the Mick's near-petrified glove is now perfectly frozen in time, molded to the calluses and bent knuckles of only one man.
No doubt my ten-year-old son will one day feel similarly moved to preserve one of my error-prone mitts used exclusively in Sunday night co-ed softball leagues. But for now I will settle for the occasional Kodak moment when he enters my office and passes up a set of golf clubs, a basketball and other sports flotsam to search for my Rawlings PRO 200HC, a Heart of the Hide infielder's glove that I treat like a duck hunter would a loyal Lab. Thick and smooth like a saddle, the black-and-brown glove consumes his left hand as he slides his short fingers into the long, cool tunnels of supple leather.
At this age not many things can quiet his hip-hop dudeness, but when he holds that glove, invariably, he summons all the humbleness he can muster and asks, "Can I have this someday?"
Then, in a sweet little ritual between aging father and Little League son, I repeat the pledge I've made to him many times before:
"Son, over my cold, lifeless body."
Hey, we're talking about my glove here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rudy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Selcraig, 03.05.01
In the first days of spring, when baseball's stallions gather in Florida and Arizona to shake off their winter slumber, a sweet ritual takes place in most clubhouses that offers a small, reaffirming moment for those who mourn the game's lost innocence.
The young millionaires will be sitting in their jocks before practice one morning watching ESPN or playing cards, when an awe-struck fellow from an overnight delivery service appears at the door bearing a pile of cardboard boxes. Suddenly the room's aloof bravado evaporates and the heroes become nine-year-olds at Christmas. Boxes burst open. Plastic bags litter the floor. And soon all you hear are the sounds of big fists pounding leather.
The new gloves have arrived.
Aroma experts and saddle-sniffing cowboys would agree—something about the smell of new leather beckons a man as surely as any Brazilian thong. Like Little League dads at a sporting goods store, big leaguers will plunge their fingers into the new mitts, tug on the stiff lacing a bit and then, helpless before eons of instinct, they bury their noses deep in the pockets and inhale, eyes closed, as if summoning thoughts of Anna Kournikova. Oh, sure, they'd rather watch Brideshead Revisited than admit to such sentimentality, but each in his own way is reviving memories of a kid's game that too often is all about money. New cowhide brings flooding back the thoughts of unspoiled things, of patient dads and boundless potential. And so, on a pilgrimage of sorts, I went to find those places where everyone understands a lifelong glove affair.
Deep in the Missouri Ozarks near the Arkansas border is a busy, blue-collar village of creeks and hardwoods called Ava, where I like to imagine the town's 1,383 families sit around dinner tables discussing the Deep-Well Pocket and the Trap-EZE Web. Here in a one-story redbrick factory that smells the way Cooperstown should, the Rawlings Sporting Goods Company makes gloves for the best players on the planet.
Rawlings has been making gloves since 1888. It supplies more than half of all major-league baseball players and still leads the retail trade with 70 plus models, followed by Wilson, Mizuno, and smaller labels like Zett, SSK, Louisville Slugger, Franklin, Easton, Nokona and 20 others. (Some companies, like The Sports Doctor, even specialize in custom-made or vintage gloves.) Sadly, of more than 2 million gloves Rawlings sold last year, only about 20,000 came from Ava. The rest were made in Rawlings' plants in the Philippines, China, Indonesia and Thailand. (Texas-based Nokona, which also crafts beautiful high-end gloves, is the only sizeable company that still makes all of its gloves in America.)
Specifically, Rawlings only makes gloves in Ava that come from what it calls "Heart of the Hide" leather, a fine grade usually from Black Angus steers raised in the upper Midwest that have no cattle brands, tick marks or barbed-wire scratches. Imagine their posthumous pride when Chicago's Horween Leather Company, which supplies all HOH leather, selects their once-blubbery hides for tanning, a nasty process involving sulfuric acid, salt and autopsy-like odors. One mitt requires about six square feet of leather, so Ava's workers can usually get three-and-a-half gloves out of one hide, which consists of the side of one animal from shoulder to butt. For Rawlings' best gloves, which cost about $170 retail, only steers, not cows, will do. When cows carry calves, explains Rawlings executive Chuck Malloy, their hides usually become too thin or wrinkled, which makes their leather more suitable for cheaper gloves that may also contain pigskin or vinyl.
This brings us to a troubling moral issue that serves as a tidy metaphor for the decline of American civilization. Flimsy baseball gloves.
If you're old enough to remember Sandy Koufax, you've no doubt noticed that most of today's gloves don't last as well as pre-'70s models. The lacing breaks more easily and they get weak and floppy, like wet oven mitts, a lot quicker. Glovemasters joke that, "They just don't make cows like they used to." True, but there's more to it.
Leather experts explain that today's inactive, rushed-to-slaughter, feedlot cattle don't have hides as strong and mature as '60s range cattle. But more distressing is that the era of instant gratification (and more single moms as glove buyers for Little Leaguers) now requires glovemakers to give kids a product they can easily flex in the store and play with right away. Companies do this by using thinner hides, oil-treating the leather and using less padding. Nearly gone are the days when it took two months of careful nurturing and playing catch to make a glove. Companies obviously sell more gloves this way. Purists are aghast.
"It's a throwaway generation," says Rawlings' head glove designer, Bob Clevenhagen, an Ozarks native whose cinder-block office at the Ava factory is a memorial to gloves that endure.
"These guys kept their gloves a long time," Clevenhagen tells me as he pulls open a drawer from a bank of gray metal file cabinets. Inside are worn manila envelopes containing the patterns and design notes for virtually every glove Rawlings has ever made, from fingerless gloves of the 1880s to the 1920 Bill Doak model that turned gloves into more than mere hand-protectors to the black Trap-EZE style made famous by Junior Griffey.
He can faithfully reproduce any of those gloves and, consequently, has gotten requests to make everything from George Bush's old Yale mitt to authentic Black Sox–era models for Field of Dreams and, recently, three Mickey Mantle models for actor Billy Crystal.
"But those are easy," Clevenhagen says, tossing me what looks like an assembly-line reject that has no thumb or pinky. Then he hands me a mother's letter with a tracing of her six-year-old's mangled left hand on notebook paper. "These are the tough ones," he says. "I get requests all the time from parents of children who have deformities. We always do what we can.… We do 'em for free."
On a rainy spring morning the Ava factory is churning out some softball gloves—softballers, especially girls' scholastic leagues, now make up one of the largest segments of the glove-buying public—and a few special orders for major leaguers like Craig Biggio, Tony Gwynn and Griffey. It's no big deal for the workers that they're stitching up a future Hall of Famer's glove, but when Clevenhagen stops by a final inspection station and hands me Griffey's nearly finished personal mitt, the Rawlings PRO-TB, I do briefly think, "Who here could possibly outrun me to that exit sign?"
Making a glove is a labor-intensive, 35-step process that can take 20 minutes to an hour for a dozen workers, all of whom develop fast, strong hands while trying to avoid repetitive stress injuries. First, the Horween hides, which cost Rawlings roughly $3.50 to $4 a square foot, are graded for their thickness—the thickest hides go to catchers' and first basemen's mitts, which take the most pounding. Using short heavy hydraulic presses called "clickers," workers punch out the leather outlines of the palm, back, fingers and linings, plus a dozen smaller pieces, then emboss all the parts with numbers and names, and sew everything together inside-out to hide the stitching. About a third of the way through, the unwieldy five-fingered monster must be turned outside-out, which is something akin to putting a queen-size sheet on a king-size mattress. "I have a woman do this," Clevenhagen says. "It takes a lot more technique than brute strength."
You can't even fit your fingers into a newly sewn glove because the inner leather linings are bunched so tightly, so workers heat up oversized aluminum "hands" to 250 degrees and slide each finger of the glove over the hot metal prongs. From here you sew in some dense gray felt padding and lace in the all-important webbing and the fingers, give it a final inspection and you're basically ready for the big time. Hum-babe hum-babe.
If you ever go to the San Francisco Giants' spring training camp in Scottsdale, Arizona, to interview players about their gloves, these are among several questions I would avoid:
Is that a junior cup you're wearing?
What's up with those syringes?
May I try on your glove?
Players might be finicky about their wives and their cars, but they're really sensitive about their gloves. "My fingers better be the only ones that go into this," the Giants' ball-crushing left-fielder, Barry Bonds, said as he showed me his 13-inch, black-and-tan Wilson with a wristband dial-thingy that adjusts its tightness.
Baseball holy men may over-romanticize some things, but there is no deeper relationship between athlete and inanimate object than there is between a major leaguer and his glove. No football helmet or hockey mask approaches this level of trust and love. "When I find a good one," Giants coach Robby Thompson says, "I call it my ‘sweet pud.' "
"It's like the girl you marry," says Giant second baseman Jeff Kent, who has used the same model, an 11-inch Rawlings 5X BCB, since 1989, when he was in the minors. "I could be blindfolded and have a hundred gloves in front of me," Kent says, "and I would know mine." As would they all. Some players, like Wade Boggs, have used the same glove for more than a decade—repairing it often, of course—and others, like the phenomenal ex-Cardinal shortstop Ozzie Smith, change gloves about every six weeks (in Smith's case, because he actually liked the stiffer feel of new leather).
Virtually every major leaguer has a glove endorsement deal. They range from the lowly (two new gloves per year, plus maybe some golf clubs) to the average ($10,000 to $20,000) to baseball's most lucrative (so far), the deal Rawlings has with Griffey, which pays $100,000-plus annually—barely more than cab fare for players making $15 million a year. These fees might be bigger except that gloves don't generate the retail revenue of, say, golf equipment, and glove logos don't often dominate your TV screen, like those on a PGA Tour golfer's bag, hat and shirt. Curiously, despite the fact that some 400 major leaguers make $1 million or more annually and hardly need a glove deal's pocket change, many have signed with companies that clearly produce lower-quality gloves. "You'd be amazed," Clevenhagen says, "at the number of multimillionaires who use $30 gloves."
When a player's new glove arrives in the spring a tactile courtship begins. Outfielders often stick both their pinky and ring fingers in the pinky finger slot of the glove to make the pocket collapse more securely around the ball; middle infielders, however, need to get rid of the ball quickly, so most wear their gloves down onto their palms for more fingertip control. Infielders like small nimble gloves—usually 11.5 inches or less, measured from the heel to the top of the index finger—and outfielders tend to go for those 13-inch jai alai baskets that are, technically, illegal. (Major League Baseball's Rule 1.14 states that gloves shall not be "more than 12 inches" long, but it's never enforced, so don't try making any citizen's arrests.)
Most major leaguers work with at least three gloves—a workhorse for practice, a backup for emergencies and the prized "gamer," which is so valued by players that on team flights most keep them in their carry-on bags rather than stow them with team equipment. "We play lots of practical jokes on each other," says Kent's infield mate, Giant shortstop Rich Aurilia, recalling some novel uses for petroleum jelly, "but it's just understood that you never mess around with a guy's glove."
Unlike a jersey, bat or ball, a leather glove actually retains the shape of the athlete's body—in this case the most important tools in baseball, the hands—so it's perfectly reasonable that actor Billy Crystal paid $239,000 at a Sotheby's auction for a 1960 Rawlings glove worn by his childhood hero, Mickey Mantle. After being pounded by hundreds of thousands of thrown balls, baked in the sun and soaked in sweat and leather conditioner for much of his career, the Mick's near-petrified glove is now perfectly frozen in time, molded to the calluses and bent knuckles of only one man.
No doubt my ten-year-old son will one day feel similarly moved to preserve one of my error-prone mitts used exclusively in Sunday night co-ed softball leagues. But for now I will settle for the occasional Kodak moment when he enters my office and passes up a set of golf clubs, a basketball and other sports flotsam to search for my Rawlings PRO 200HC, a Heart of the Hide infielder's glove that I treat like a duck hunter would a loyal Lab. Thick and smooth like a saddle, the black-and-brown glove consumes his left hand as he slides his short fingers into the long, cool tunnels of supple leather.
At this age not many things can quiet his hip-hop dudeness, but when he holds that glove, invariably, he summons all the humbleness he can muster and asks, "Can I have this someday?"
Then, in a sweet little ritual between aging father and Little League son, I repeat the pledge I've made to him many times before:
"Son, over my cold, lifeless body."
Hey, we're talking about my glove here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
rudy.