A baseball glove or mitt is a large leather glove that baseball players on the defending team are allowed to wear to assist them in catching and fielding balls hit by a batter, or thrown by a teammate.
Early baseball was a game played without gloves. During the slow transition to gloves, a player who continued to play without one was called a barehanded catcher. This did not refer to the position of Catcher, but rather to the practice of catching with bare hands. The earliest glove was not webbed and not particularly well suited for catching, but was used more to bat a ball to the ground so that it could be picked up. No doubt this lack of functionality contributed to the early resistance to the glove.
One of the first players believed to use a baseball glove was Doug Allison, a catcher for the Cincinnati Red Stockings, in 1870, due to an injured left hand.[1] The first documented story of glove use concerns Charles Waitt, a St. Louis outfielder/first baseman who in 1875 donned a pair of flesh-colored gloves. While glove usage was not accepted by all players at first, being considered “sissy” by many, it slowly caught on as more and more players began using different forms of gloves. “We used no mattress on our hands, No cage upon our face; We stood right up and caught the ball, With courage and with grace.”[2] That was the typical reaction from the “old-time” players when the gloves were first introduced.
Many early baseball gloves were simple leather gloves with the fingertips cut off, supposedly to allow for the same control of a bare hand, but with extra padding. The adoption of the baseball glove by baseball star Albert Spalding when he began playing first base influenced more infielders to begin using gloves. By the mid 1890s, it was the norm for players to wear gloves in the field.
It was an ironic fate for Spalding, as he once was skeptical to don the new glove in baseball, but then rose to the occasion and did it. He afterwards created the sporting goods empire known as Spalding Since their beginnings, baseball gloves have grown. While catching in baseball had always been two handed, eventually, gloves grew to a size that made it easier to catch the ball in the webbing of the glove, and use the off-hand to keep it from falling out.
A glove is typically worn on the non-dominant hand, leaving the dominant hand for throwing the ball; for example, a right-handed player would wear a glove on the left hand. By convention, the type of glove that fits on the left hand is called a “right-handed” or “RH” glove. The shape and size of the baseball gloves is governed by official baseball rules; Section 1.00, Objectives of the Game, defines limits of catcher’s, first baseman’s and fielder’s glove in parts 1.12, 1.13 and 1.14.
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