Batting Gloves
Wednesday, May 25 2022 @ 11:00 AM EDT
Contributed by: Magpie
When did this all get started?
Let's walk it backward a little bit, via the miracle of YouTube. By 1985, batting gloves seem to have been adopted almost unanimously. There's video of the Jays' clinching victory against the Yankees on the final weekend. Almost every one of the Blue Jays - Garcia, Moseby, Upshaw, Bell, Barfield, Oliver, Fernandez, Johnson - wears gloves on both hands. Garth Iorg and Ernie Whitt each wear a glove on their left hand (Whitt's top hand, Iorg's bottom hand.) Only Rance Mulliniks goes without. It's a similar story for the Yankees. Most players - Henderson, Griffey, Mattingly, Hassey, Baylor, Randolph - have gloves on both hands. Winfield and Meacham both wear a single glove on their left (bottom) hand. Only Mike Pagliarulo does without. Perhaps it was a thing among third basemen.
Ten years earlier, it's a different story, but even in 1975 more players are wearing a glove than not. Gloves on both hands are only worn by Geronimo and Concepcion of the Reds, and Fisk of the Red Sox. Just one glove, usually on the bottom hand, is the most common choice - that's how it's done by Griffey, Bench, and Perez of the Reds and Cooper and Burleson of the Red Sox. Yastrzemski and Petrocelli of the Red Sox wear a single glove on their top hand, as does Pete Rose - but Rose during this period appears to be wearing a single glove on his left hand no matter which side of the plate he's hitting from. And there are still a few players on each side - Morgan and Foster of the Reds, Evans, Lynn, and Doyle of the Red Sox - who go without.
Five years earlier, in the 1970 World Series, things are rather different. Only one of the Orioles, catcher Andy Etchebarren, wears a glove while batting and one suspects he was wearing the same glove inside his catcher's mitt. All the others are bare-handed, although Boog Powell in particular seems to have plunged his hands into a vat of baby powder. Rosin, probably. More gloves can be seen on the Cincinnati side - Davey Concepcion on both hands, making him some kind of innovator. Rose, Perez, May, and Helms have a single glove on the bottom (left) hand while Tolan, Bench, and McRae go without.
And just two years before that, in the 1968 World Series, batting gloves are much more of a novelty. Just three players on each side wear a hitting glove - in each case it's a single glove on the bottom hand. Horton, Northrup, and Freehan are the gloved Tigers while McAuilffe, Stanley, Kaline, Cash, and Wert go without. For the Cardinals, Flood, Cepeda, and Shannon wear gloves while Brock, Maris, McCarver, Javier, and Maxvil do not.
You could, I suppose, look all this up on Wikipedia and get just a little taste of Old Ball Player BS. The story there comes from Ken Harrelson, who has long taken credit for the innovation. His story is that one day he played 27 holes of golf with three other players (Ted Bowsfield, Gino Cimoli, and Sammy Esposito). He developed a blister during batting practice and wore his golf glove during that evening's game. Naturally he hit two long homers off Whitey Ford.
Harrelson did hit two home runs off Whitey Ford, although they came two years apart, so that part of the story can't be true. He hit the first one on a Friday night in Kansas City, in September 1964. At the time Harrelson was 22 years old, in his second season, still trying to establish himself as a major leaguer (he'd spent roughly half of both the 1963 and 1964 seasons in AAA, and wouldn't make it to stay until 1965.) Ted Bowsfield was indeed his teammate with the Athletics at the time. Sammy Esposito's professional career was over, but he certainly could have joined Harrelson and Bowsfield for a few rounds before heading to the ball park. Unfortunately Gino Cimoli had been released by Kansas City in April. He'd caught on with the Orioles and played there for a while but by September Cimoli was playing for Rochester in the IL, so it seems unlikely that he was in Kansas City playing golf on the day. Rochester's season wouldn't end for another week.
But, hey, maybe Harrelson was wearing a golf glove when he homered against Ford in September 1964. And Harrelson did hit a second homer in the same game - it came against Yankees reliever Pete Mikkelson in the bottom of the ninth and it tied the score. At which point Ted Bowsfield, possibly shagged out from 27 holes of golf earlier in the day, came out for a second inning of work and allowed the first three Yankees to reach base. They would all score and the Yankees had the first win of a 23-7 streak that would vault them from third place to yet another pennant.
Could that be Zero Hour? We know for sure that Bob Allison of the Twins was wearing a glove in the next year's World Series, in October 1965. How do we know? Because there's video. Allison was a right-handed hitter and he was wearing a glove on his left hand as he went hitless in four trips against Sandy Koufax. He seems to be the only hitter on either team so equipped.
But wait! There's a compilation of video highlights from the 1964 World Series out there on the Interwebs. And we can see that Clete Boyer of the Yankees is wearing a glove on his left hand as he grounds out against Dr Ron Taylor to finish the fourth game. And that's Roger Maris sporting one on his right hand in the sixth game. Neither Boyer nor Maris were wearing batting gloves a year earlier, in the 1963 series, and as far as I can tell neither was anyone else on either team.
So maybe - just maybe - Boyer and Maris noticed a distinctly mediocre young Kansas City outfielder (Harrelson hit .194 in 49 games for the A's in 1964) wearing a golf glove on his hand when he hit a couple of long home runs against them in early September. And they thought they'd give it a try, in the midst of a harrowing pennant race. Well, gosh - when you put it that way... doesn't seem all that likely after all.
Did it work? Did they got hot? Not really. Maris hit .282/.333/.470 the rest of the way, which is almost an exact match of what he'd done over the first five months, before that weekend in Kansas City. Boyer hit just .244/.289/.300 down the stretch. While it was a slight improvement (he'd been having an awful year to that point) it's obviously nothing to get excited about.
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