$300 for a baseball glove?
December 24, 2012 by Coach McCreary
Filed under Misc
Recently I bought a new baseball glove. That doesn’t sound like a big deal but it’s the first glove I’ve bought since 1990. I was fortunate that after a season of pro ball under my belt, I received a Rawlings contract which provided me two free gloves of my choosing per year. Not the million dollar endorsement contracts you see star players get in the major leagues but I certainly wasn’t complaining. Give me
Funny … I didn’t see this model offered anywhere online.
two free gloves a year of my choosing and I’m in heaven. And I was!
The last of those gloves finally went off to baseball heaven (actually the donation bin) so I was in need of another. I didn’t realize what I was in for. I figured I get a top of the line model for infielders since that’s what I was used to. I also felt it might hurt my credibility a bit if I produce more instructional videos for higher level baseball skills using a Power Ranger glove. People who know the game notice those kinds of things. So I jump online and immediately go for Rawlings out of loyalty. There are other glove makers that have awesome gloves but they hooked me up when I was a nobody so they are getting my money today in return.
Wow.
Can you believe how expensive gloves are? God bless the parents of a high school kid today. My goodness! I saw several gloves from a variety of makers over $300 and most of the top notch infielders gloves were in the $200 range. That’s just crazy.
I spent about a week searching obscure websites looking for the best deal possible. By the way, if you want to see a great website with awesome looking stuff, click HERE. It’s Japanese. And they sure like their colors! Of course, I can’t read Japanese and their prices are in yen so I have no idea how prices compare. It certainly is a fun site to click through though. So, I found a Rawlings glove at a site called HQ4SPORTS.com. It was something like 50% off their clearance price so I paid around $50. It took forever to get to me but it was a steal so I was happy.
This process reminded me of one of my very first posts for Baseball By The Yard back in December, 2010. It was called All I want for Christmas is a … stick ball and a broom handle. The $200 glove I mentioned in the beginning of the post was intended to be an exaggeration. Apparently it wasn’t. The photo up above also came to mind while searching the internet for the best deal on an infielder’s glove. The best infielders in the world often come from a tiny island in the Caribbean. A tiny third world country where $300 handmade gloves don’t exist. On one hand, their gloves are also handmade but as the picture shows, the material tends to be somewhat different. They use molded scrap cardboard or manipulated milk cartons.
Kind of makes you wonder how they turn out so good. My guess is that it has nothing to do with the glove.
This was a topic of conversation at the Christmas diner table. I also came across this interview with Mariano Rivera, and he demonstrates how to make a cardboard glove. http://larrybrownsports.com/baseball/mariano-rivera-used-to-make-a-baseball-glove-out-of-cardboard-video/88642
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