A man and his glove? True love

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Friday, March 28, 2003

A man and his glove? True love

By JOHN LEVESQUE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

If your home were ablaze, your loved ones were safe and you had a chance to go back and retrieve one cherished possession, what would it be?

With apologies to everyone preserved in photo albums around the house, the answer here has been the same for many years:

My baseball glove.

As gloves go, it's nothing special. And yet it's more special than finding out your heart-healthy spinach salad comes with a side of fries. It's a 1977 Rawlings Fastback with the patented Edge-U-Cated Heel and Reggie Jackson's factory-stamped signature, now so faded the "Reggie" barely registers. Never mind that it's a right-hander's glove and Jackson throws left. Or that Jackson, his Cooperstown enshrinement notwithstanding, was the fielding equivalent of a colander. The glove felt right when I bought it. Feels even better now.

It usually sits in the trunk of my car -- more about that later -- but if we're talking hypothetical infernos, with all material possessions being fair game, the glove gets rescued every time. Besides, it does find its way into the house on occasion. I've been known to watch a "big game" on TV with my glove on, as if a foul ball might come sofa-ward. Can't explain it, other than to say we're very close. (The glove and I, that is, though I'm on friendly terms with the sofa, too).

I suspect Noah Liberman understands. By weekday a writer for Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal, Liberman spent nights and weekends the past two years writing "Glove Affairs: The Romance, History and Tradition of the Baseball Glove" (Triumph Books, $19.95). Consider it the utility infielder of baseball books: It's got history and legend, pathos and humor, and all sorts of helpful information on the care and feeding of leather and laces (including a lubricant known as Glove Loogie).

Inspired by loss

Liberman says he decided to write the book after he lost the Wilson A2000 that had taken him from Pony League as a kid to weekend softball as a larger kid.

"I realized how much I missed this glove," he said by phone yesterday. "Within those feelings I figured there was a book on the business of gloves, the science of gloves and the sentimentality of gloves."

"Glove Affairs" is to sports anecdotes what daffodils are to flowerbeds this time of year. Starting with a foreword by Yogi Berra, believed to be the first catcher to poke his index finger outside the mitt, it entertains with dozens of stories of early gloves (the first to use them in 1870 were considered less than manly), first gloves (Ozzie Smith doesn't remember his) and funky gloves (Walt Weiss had one called "The Creature," an ever-ripening fusion of dry rot and lubricant).

"I can't think of another piece of sporting equipment that's more individual," Liberman said. "When players lose their gloves, it can mess up a whole season."

The book recalls Bret Boone's panic when the Mariners second baseman mistakenly tossed his glove to a fan while signing autographs at Safeco Field in 2001. The fan left the ballpark before Boone realized he had the fan's glove and the fan had his. A public appeal produced a happy ending: The fan, Daryl Carr, returned the glove and Boone gratefully gave him a baseball bat, which Carr considered a more estimable artifact.

"Maybe Carr had never owned a glove," Liberman writes, "because he didn't seem to understand that he'd just traded a one-of-a-kind reflection of Boone's body and soul for a piece of ash just like dozens of others in the storage room."

Sounds like overstatement, but if a good-glove, no-arm outfielder like me can feel most at ease, most contented, when he's got a baseball glove on his left hand, who's to say a pro ballplayer's glove isn't truly an extension of himself?

Seeking the thwip

The closest thing I have to a hobby is shagging fly balls. If I had the endurance of a 12-year-old and someone to hit fungoes every day, this column would have appeared weeks ago. As much as I like this writing thing (more precisely: I like having written), it still can't compare to the mathematical fulfillment of intersecting with the flight of a ball -- something I could never do on paper -- and hearing the soft thwip of leather in webbing.

Like everything else under a high Arizona sky, gloves have become collectibles within the sphere of those who invest in objets de sport because they have the means and the shelf space. Liberman says he is indebted to Joe Phillips, publisher of The Glove Collector newsletter, for much of the information in his book.

I have as much interest in collecting other gloves as I have in collecting dust, especially if the gloves are so valuable that no one would want to use them in a game. One well-worn glove at a time is fine. But a word of warning: Leaving it in the car can be riskier than the Mariners' spring ERA. The only reason I have the current Fastback is that its predecessor was in the trunk of my car when it was stolen in 1977.

The car was a dog, but the glove was like a favorite pet. I mourned for a while, then moved on, matured. Just haven't gotten to the point where I'm comfortable leaving it in the house, if you know what I mean.

P-I columnist John Levesque can be reached at 206-448-8330 or johnlevesque@seattlepi.com