Rawlings…Finest In the Field by Joe Phillips

Thanks to some innovative baseball players and three fine glove designers Rawlings Sporting Goods fairly dominated the baseball glove landscape from 1922 forward. “Finest in the Field” and it stuck! At one point, in the 1950s, Rawlings was claiming that roughly 80% of all gloves worn on major leaguers’ hands. I don’t know if the […]

Brooklyn Dodger Mystique – Will it Last? by Joe Phillips

Will the legacy and collecting favor of the Brooklyn Dodgers last or become a baseball memory row of apartment buildings like its old home: Ebbets Field? Focusing directly, we’re talking about the Brooklyn Dodger team(s) from 1947 to 1956 which left an indelible impression on not only baseball but on the nation in that decade.

[…]

Joe Jackson the Player, the Myth, the Glove by Joe Phillips

For most baseball followers, it’s difficult to distinguish the Joe Jackson who starred for Philadelphia, Cleveland, and most notably, Chicago White Sox, AKA the Black Sox, from the mystical Joe Jackson of book and movie fame.

Two movies a year apart: “Eight Men Out” (1988) and “Field Of Dreams” (1989) produced two distinct views of […]

Lou Brock Game-Used Glove by Joe Phillips

My curiosity was aroused the other day when I was reviewing a Lou Brock game-used glove. The thought suddenly occurred to me that there were probably more Brock game gloves in existence than one could find retail endorsed models.

Though he was a MacGregor Glove Company endorser and used the MacGregor gloves for the most […]

Hobby Perspective by Joe Phillips

Two recent events have set my mind to thoughts of our glove hobby and its evolution in the past 20 years.

One of these is the internet. Our collecting passion for baseball gloves and mitts, like many collectibles in the antique fields, has felt the full impact of the electronic wizardry […]

Like Any Market Vintage Gloves Have Ups and Downs by Joe Phillips

Back in the summer of 2012, a classic find of mint condition baseball cards were located in the attic of an Ohio home.

These cards, though not in a particular valuable or rare issued set from the 1920s, took the baseball collecting world and especially the venerable card market by shock and the find was […]

The Big Bang & Little Bang by Joe Phillips

A sale on ebay that’s been up for over a year carries some mint and mint in the box gloves that we determined came from 1980s sale of gloves from a store or warehouse in Baltimore. That sale resulted in a Glove Collectors Book being produced by Jim Mace, son of a doctor who had […]

Gloves in the Movies by Joe Phillips

Back in the early yon of glove collecting, (early 1990s) several movies were in the hopper. “Eight Men Out” about the 1919 Black Sox World Series scandal and a followup bigger box office draw, “Field Of Dreams.” Both movies were under the direction of John Sales.

Curiosity got the best of us as we were […]

Sports Illustrated Story on Nokona Replica Glove Revelation by Joe Phillips

The publication in June of 1991 of the story on Nokona glove making and our program to make reproduction of its gloves had the germination of a chance conversation with Jim Storey, then president of Nocona Athletic Goods. When we told him were looking for a direct mail marketing program, he mentioned that many old […]

More On the Glove Finds by Joe Phillips

There were several little side notes to the “big” glove finds.

1. The Baltimore or Dr. Mace find. John Graham and I were able to buy about a half dozen of these gloves, some still in their original boxes from a Fort Worth Texas collector who had about 20 or 30 of them and who […]

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 […]

Sports Illustrated June 1991 by Joe Phillips

In casual conversation with then Nocona Glove President Jim Storey in 1990, I mentioned a project using Nocona ball gloves as a direct mail project. He replied that they always had requests for players wanting their old gloves from previous years, even previous decades. “We can still make them as we have the dies. Maybe […]

Up The Dusty Trail To Nocona Athletic Goods by Joe Phillips

In mid December of 1975 on the referral of a friend, my boss and I travelled some 70 miles to the tiny North Texas town of Nocona, Texas to call on a prospective new client, Nocona Athletic Goods Company, producer of the Nokona gloves which I had used in past days and was very familiar […]