Glove ’90s by Joe Phillips

We often wonder when we might get into another “big” glove find with multiples of mint/near mint gloves from old Sporting Goods stores or warehouses. There were several of these glove mines discovered in the late 1980s and 1990s. The biggest of these was what we’ve termed the “Kansas Find” in a warehouse just out of Wichita Kansas. Dave Bushing and I finally peeled back the layers of discoveries that kept popping up here and there and reached the man who had possession of the gloves, about 400 of them, mostly of the gloves of the 1950s including 40 some odd Duke Snider DS Rawlings models. When we assembled them in Dave’s home in Chicago, a collector who came by, sighed, “Well, I just died and went to heaven.”
It was a momentous time but in a year or so all of them were sold off.

Only about a year before this I found a cache of gloves from a “closing down” sporting goods store in San Antonio named Potcherniks (sp). There were about 30 gloves in boxes including some Mickey Mantle gloves.

Other discoveries of course was the late 1980s of a warehouse in Baltimore where some 100 plus gloves were uncovered and sold with Dr. Mace buying hundreds of these and his son, Jim, later published a book covering and posting pictures of these gloves. The book still makes the rounds on the internet sales.

Others that come to mind are the “EmJay” gloves (Denkert made I think) that came out of North or South Carolina. We did a story on one collector who purchased many of these, Dan Creed. I believe there were 40 or 50 of these gloves that made it to market.

The only other “lot” finds I can recall was that a collector turned up about 20 or 30 mostly Spalding gloves, with several Sal Bando gloves and MacGregor Tony Perez models.

Before the Kansas discovery, we were kept busy producing Nokona replica gloves from Nokona which were becoming popular from an article “Sports Illustrated” did on the company and our project to reproduce these.

Soon, all we could concentrate on in the next few years was providing information on the baseball glove collecting hobby which was beginning to take off.

Next: Watching the hobby mature.