baseball glove : Fix Your Own Glove (1)

As I sat there watching the pitcher and infielders warm up in between innings, out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of the coaches just outside the dugout trying to get someone's attention. When I realized it was my attention he was trying to get, I gave a nod. He then barked out, "Got another one!" and proceeded to throw a fielder's glove at me. I caught it, gave it a quick inspection and knew what I'd being doing a little later that evening.

Well that's how it has gone the last four or five years now when I'm in the dugout or around local baseball or softball fields. I've repaired gloves for a number of players and hence I've been labeled as "The Doctor". Word has gotten out over the years and I've fixed many gloves for small kids, big kids, adults, you name it. I never realized how much people liked their gloves and I also never realized that people didn't fix their own gloves when they broke, even the simplest repairs.

That's how this all started for me. One day I repaired an older Wilson A2000 from the late 70's or early 80's. It was being used by a younger girl playing softball. It was her dad's glove in college. It needed a lot of lace work but was in surprisingly good shape other than that. It looked great when I was done.

Since then, I've repaired gloves for a lot of kids. Never charged anything, which was probably a small mistake. I was just glad to get the glove back to them the next day or so. I didn't think much about until I was looking around on the Internet about a year ago and saw what repairing baseball gloves costs both in money and time. Only then did it occur to me how much money I saved kids and parents and more importantly, the glove was lost for one game at the most.

This is what I'm getting at. If you have young kids active in baseball/softball or are a member of a team or teams yourself, you should really look into trying to repair a few gloves yourself, in your spare time. Believe me, it will come in handy more times than you think and you can save yourself and other people some money.

Let me define what I mean by baseball glove repair. I don't mean repairing major tears in the leather and the little runs of stitching in the glove. That stuff requires more tools, leather and time. I'm talking about repairing the most common types of lacing breaks that occur throughout a season and just relacing these breaks or retightening lace runs to keep the glove in its original shape and form.

By Chico Reese